Dell and HPE battle it out for server market dominance

Statistical tie declared between vendor giants as both see market share decline, according to IDC

Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) are tied at the top of the server market despite both seeing reductions in their respective shares, according to IDC.

The analyst firm declared the two tech titans to be tied in Q2 this year, with HPE leading slightly with 14.9 per cent of the market and Dell with 13.9 per cent in the quarter. IDC declares a tie when is a difference of one per cent or less in the share of revenues or shipments among two or more vendors.

However, both firms saw their market share shrink year on year. HPE's market share fell over three per cent year on year, while Dell's fell five per cent.

Overall vendor revenue in the global server market grew 19.8 per cent year on year to $24bn during the second quarter, with worldwide shipments growing over 18 per cent to 3.2 million shipments.

Broken down by server class, high-end systems made the greatest stride in revenues, growing over 44 per cent to $1.9bn, while volume server grew 22 per cent to $18.7bn and midrange saw a slight fall of 0.4 per cent.

"Global demand for enterprise servers was strong during the second quarter of 2020," said Paul Maguranis, senior research analyst of infrastructure platforms and technologies at IDC.

"We certainly see areas of reduced spending, but this was offset by investments made by large cloud builders and enterprises targeting solutions that support shifting infrastructure needs caused by the global pandemic."

Inspur ranked third with 10.5 per cent of the market and an impressive 77 per cent year-on-year growth, while Lenovo and IBM share fourth place.

Geographically, the US market grew 25 per cent, while EMEA declined nearly six per cent in the period.