14 DAY TRIAL // With all this talk about Cloud computing and how it's the best thing since sliced bread, you'd think that server shipments would have grown by a massive amount in 2013, but that's not what happened at all.
Sure, they went up 2.1% year-over-year, with the fourth quarter showing a 3.2% improvement, but ultimately revenues went down. More specifically, they dropped 4.5%.
The constrained enterprise market is to blame, according to market analyst firm Gartner, and the RISC/Itanium Unix platform was mostly responsible for that.
Moving on, growth by region was of 16.3% in Asia/Pacific, 7.5% in Japan, and 0.01% in North America.
HP and Cisco were, ultimately, the only ones whose businesses grew in the fourth quarter of 2014, while IBM declined the most.
All in all, this is all pretty surprising, because with dropping PC sales and increase in mobile gadgets that are always-connected, there is a growing need for carrier data centers, if nothing else.
HP accounted for most of the revenue, in the fourth quarter at least, with $3.8 billion / €2.75 billion, meaning a worldwide share of 28.1%. Server shipments went up 8.7%.
As time goes by and ARM servers start picking speed, maybe the layout of the industry will change more, for the better even.