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The enterprise hardware market is growing. You read that right. Growing

Servers up six points. Switches up, slightly. Routers up. Really. Cloud? Not a killer, it seems

The enterprise hardware market is growing. You read that right, growing.

So says abacus-wielder IDC which this week emitted new Worldwide Quarterly Trackers for servers, ethernet switches and routers.

The overall server market, the firm says, was up by 6.1 per cent for 2015's second quarter compared to the same period in 2014. It's also the second-best quarter, revenue-wise, among the last five, as the chart below shows.

Quarter Server sales
Q2 '14 US$12.7bn
Q3 '14 US$12.75bn
Q4 '14 US$14.53bn
Q1 '15 US$12.82bn
Q2 '15 US$13.48bn

Ethernet switches grew one per cent over the quarter to a total of US$5.8 billion. That's not a result to get the heart racing but is, thanks to a rebound in sales, a result that pours a little cold water on the notion that software-defined networking will be shrinking the network hardware market in a hurry.

Routers ramped up: IDC says “The worldwide enterprise and service provider router market increased 11.5% year over year in 2Q15. Contrary to the previous quarter, both the enterprise and service provider segments saw strong growth. The enterprise segment increased 8.3% year over year and 7.7% quarter over quarter in 2Q15.” Even Juniper has nice numbers to point to: it scored year-over-year increase of 6.9% and sequential growth of 15.5% in 2Q15.

The abacus-wielders even go so far there are happy days ahead for Ethernet, predicting growing demand for 10Gb and 40Gb switches in the near term, then another surge of growth as 25Gb, 50Gb, and 100Gb Ethernet become common.

Top 5 Corporate Family, Worldwide Server Systems Factory Revenue, Second Quarter of 2015 (Revenues are in Millions)

Vendor

2Q15 Revenue

2Q15 Market Share

2Q14 Revenue

2Q14 Market Share

2Q15/2Q14 Revenue Growth

1. HP

$3,427.7

25.4%

$3,181.7

25.1%

7.7%

2. Dell

$2,364.3

17.5%

$2,233.4

17.6%

5.9%

3. IBM

$1,994.4

14.8%

$2,972.0

23.4%

-32.9%

4. Lenovo*

$949.2

7.0%

$144.7

1.1%

556.1%

4. Cisco*

$866.7

6.4%

$726.7

5.7%

19.3%

ODM Direct

$942.6

7.0%

$834.9

6.6%

12.9%

Others

$2,930.5

21.7%

$2,602.6

20.5%

11.9%

Total

$13,476

100%

$12,696

100%

6.1%

Source:  IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, August 2015
* Note:  IDC declares a statistical tie in the worldwide server market when there is less than one percent difference in the revenue share of two or more vendors.

The server data does show that ODMs and "others" are doing alright, which probably means the hyperscale server vendor are doing alright too. But overall, the three Trackers show that enterprise hardware is doing alright.

One thing to note: the three Trackers released this week don't touch on storage. Yet even market's doing alright. Who's afraid of the big, bad cloud now? ®

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