HP leads India's x86 server market with 38% share

The x86 server market in India grew by 7.5 percent in terms of units, while in terms of revenue the market witnessed a double-digit year on year growth in Q1 2015, according to IDC.

A key highlight of this quarter was the increased uptake of higher priced density and rack optimised servers that led to an increase in the ASP of the servers in Q1 2015 and  in-turn resulted in a higher growth percentage in terms of revenue rather than units.

Professional Services, Communications and Media, Banking and Manufacturing verticals continued to be the major contributors in Q1 2015.

The non-x86 server market marginally grew by 7 percent year on year in terms of revenue. Both PSU and Private banks contributed to this growth by investing in technology refresh deals. Refresh and upgrade deals are expected from all verticals especially from the telecom organisations in CY 2015, the market research firm added.

White box players are gaining traction among e-commerce and cloud providers and starting to figure in the consideration set of some of the  traditional customers as well. The primary reason for this is cost and increased control over their infrastructure. Traditional vendors need to revisit their mitigation plans to nullify the impact from white-box players.

Hybrid cloud is fast becoming the need of the hour and this in turn is increasing the penetration of software defined solutions. Software defined solutions are expected to  help organisations access applications from different cloud providers seamlessly and simplify management while migrating some of the on-premise applications to various cloud platforms.

“Digitisation, refresh and upgrade opportunities, government backed e-governance and other state level initiatives and new implementations are collectively driving the growth for server market in India. There is a visible shift in purchase pattern for Indian organisations where strategic initiatives and involvement from LoBs (in purchase decisions) are increasingly becoming the deciding factors against the earlier transactional approach,” Gaurav Sharma, research manager, enterprise computing, IDC India, said.

In India x86 server market, HP continued to lead in Q1 2015 with 38 percent market share in terms of units, followed by Dell with a share of 19 percent. Lenovo increased its share marginally due to large multi-million dollars deal in central Government vertical.

White box players have also witnessed year on year growth as some of the organisations specially cloud providers are preferring them for reducing cost and greater control over their infrastructure.

Huge demand for compute from e-tailing and cloud providers supported by the traditional spending is expected to take the market to a new high in 2015. Technology refresh and upgradation deals from Banking and Telecom verticals are expected in the next few quarters. In addition to this, recent government initiatives are also expected to add to the demand in CY 2015.