Dell Is 'Extremely Bullish' On Server Market Dominance Over HPE

Dell EMC’s server leader Ashley Gorakhpurwalla is "extremely bullish" on the company's leadership future in the server market after Dell bested the likes of Hewlett Packard Enterprise to once again achieve the No. 1 worldwide server market position in the third quarter of 2018.

"It's all working according to plan. We have seen just a tremendous increase across all the different workloads, segments and geographies that we want to invest towards and that we participate in," said Gorakhpurwalla, president and general manager for Dell EMC's Server Solutions business, in an interview with CRN. "We are going to grow. We feel very, very confident about how customers are adopting technology. … For the servers and compute platforms that we've delivered in the third quarter, we would have grown 100 percent year-over-year in compute platforms that have accelerated technology for machine learning. That's an incredible growth rate."

Round Rock, Texas-based Dell was the worldwide market leader in server revenue for third quarter 2018 with $4.09 billion in sales, up a whopping 33 percent year over year, according to market data from IDC. HPE came in second place with worldwide server sales of $3.8 billion, up 15 percent year over year.

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These numbers represent a significant server market shift from the same quarter one year ago. In third quarter 2017, HPE was the worldwide server revenue leader with $3.31 billion in sales, followed by Dell at $3.07 billion.

Dell's server market share hit 17.5 percent for third quarter 2018, followed by HPE with 16.3 percent, then Inspur at 7.3 percent after it generated $1.7 billion in server revenue.

"What we're seeing is customer success and partner success. I think partners and customers are driving more value from having Dell EMC and Dell Technologies be their trusted adviser," said Gorakhpurwalla.

Dell also sold the most amount of servers during the third quarter of 2018, shipping a total of 556 million units, up 10 percent year over year. HPE shipped the second most at 456 million servers, representing a decline of 9 percent year over year, according to IDC.

For Dell's recent fiscal third quarter, revenue from its Infrastructure Solutions Group – which includes servers, storage and networking – reached $8.9 billion, up 19 percent year over year. Dell's server and networking sales hit $5.1 billion, up a whopping 30 percent year over year.

"We’ve had phenomenal success this year," said Gorakhpurwalla. "We've built an amazing and talented team, probably the best in the industry."

IDC reported total vendor revenue for worldwide servers reached $23.4 billion in the third quarter, up 37.7 percent year over year. Worldwide server shipments also increased 18 percent year over year to 3.2 million units shipped in the third quarter. IDC said server growth stemmed from ongoing enterprise refresh cycle and high demand from cloud service providers.