From PC World: Hewlett-Packard took back its server crown from IBM last quarter as the overall market contracted and Taiwanese vendors made big gains selling directly to Internet giants like Google and Facebook, IDC reported Wednesday.
HP expanded its share of the market only modestly from a year earlier but IBM's portion declined 4.5 points despite solid mainframe sales, to leave HP in the top spot. HP finished the third quarter with 28.1 percent of worldwide server revenue to IBM's 23.4 percent, IDC said.
But the strongest growth was for the "ODM direct" segment which IDC broke out for the first time this quarter. It stands for original design manufacturers, which are Taiwanese firms like Quanta Computer, Wistron Group, Inventec, and Compal, which sell partial and fully built servers to the big cloud providers.
It's a growing segment and one that threatens the incumbents. ODM's accounted for 6.5 percent of server revenue last quarter, up 45.2 percent from a year earlier, IDC said. If the ODM category were a single vendor, it would be the third largest ahead of Dell.
Almost 80 percent of the ODM's server revenue came from the U.S., primarily from sales to Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Rackspace.
Overall, the server market declined 3.7 percent from a year earlier to $12.1 billion. It was the third consecutive quarter of declining revenue but IDC predicts improvement with a refresh cycle early next year. In terms of units shipped, volumes were about flat year over year, meaning average selling prices dropped.
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