IDC data shows that HP ranks first in the global server market, and demand for x86-based ProLiant servers has increased, but revenue for Itanium-based Integrity servers has continued to weaken.

The demand for x86 servers improved in the second quarter of 2014. In the quarter, global x86 server revenues increased by 7.8% year-on-year to US$9.8 billion, and shipments increased by 1.5% to 2.2 million servers. Hewlett-Packard dominated the market, with a revenue share of 29.6% and a year-on-year increase of 7.4%. Dell still holds the second place with a revenue share of 21.2%.

Blade servers are used extensively in enterprise virtualization and converged environments. Blade server sales increased by 7.0% year-on-year to US$2.1 billion. Blade servers currently account for 17.0% of total server revenue. Hewlett-Packard still holds the first position in the blade server market, with a market share of 42.2%; Cisco and IBM accounted for the second and third positions in the blade market, respectively, with revenue share of 25.2% and 13.7% respectively.

Jed Scaramella, research director of IDC's enterprise server and data center, said that the server market is basically mature, and modular servers (blade servers and density-optimized servers) are the market segments that can provide suppliers with growth. As an integrated system building block, blade servers will continue to promote enterprise customers toward the private cloud. The development path can be said to be revolutionary. On the other hand, density-optimized servers are rapidly being adopted by hyperscale data centers because of their scalability and validity of the form factor. “

IDC also said that HP has always dominated low-end servers (also known as x86 systems) and blade servers, but in the higher-end server (non-x86 systems) market, IBM is still the first throne in this business. Revenue accounted for approximately 69.1% of the world's total revenue.

Therefore, Hewlett-Packard is the first in two major server markets, the x86 server market and the blade server market. IBM ranks first in the non-X86 server market. One of the reasons HP outstrips IBM’s position as the world’s largest server vendor is that Lenovo's $2.3 billion acquisition of IBM’s low-end server business brought uncertainty. Another reason is that HP still dominates the low-end server (x86 system server) and blade server market, while IBM still ranks first in the high-end non-x86 server system market, with a share of 69.1%.