HPE Touts Q4 Share Gains In Server, Storage Versus Dell

Paul Cohen, vice president of sales for New York-based PKA Technologies, No. 429 on the CRN 2020 Solution Provider 500, says the share gains are a result of HPE being ‘extremely aggressive’ with ‘demo-units, proof of concept marketing and investment’ in the channel. ‘All those things are helping us win,’ he says.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Friday said it is gained share in servers and storage over rival Dell, citing just released worldwide revenue data from market researcher International Data Corp (IDC).

In the server market, HPE said it finished the fourth quarter in a statistical tie with Dell in worldwide server revenue market share, according to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker. Due to the existing joint venture between HPE and its China based affiliate New H3C Group, IDC is reporting external market share on a global level for HPE and New H3C Group as HPE.

IDC said it “declares a statistical tie” in the worldwide server market when there is a “difference of one percent or less” in the share of revenues or shipments among two or more vendors.

“HPE’s quarter-over-quarter growth of 13.7 percent is more than double that of Dell’s, which was 5.6 percent,” HPE said in a statement provided to CRN. “HPE’s strong performance is based on continued demand for compute solutions that span from industry-standard servers to high-end supercomputing.”

IDC said the worldwide server market grew overall 1.5 percent year over year to $25.8 billion during the fourth quarter.

IDC did not provide specific server and storage revenue figures as they usually do with the Tracker services.

Dell deferred to IDC to speak to Worldwide Quarterly Server and Storage Tracker research.

CRN reached out to IDC but had not heard back at press time.

In the storage market, HPE said it continued in the fourth quarter to grow and take worldwide revenue share versus rivals including Dell/EMC, citing data from IDC’s worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker.

“In Q4CY’20, when the overall Storage market declined and Dell/EMC, NetApp, and Pure Storage declined, HPE grew 10.8 percent year over year and gained 1.3 percentage points of market share,” said HPE. “HPE cemented its position as the #2 market leader for Storage.”

IDC said the external storage market was down 2.1 percent year over year in the fourth quarter. The market for the full year declined four percent, IDC said.

HPE said the storage gains build on the momentum from the preceding quarter when HPE “stood out with 7.8 percent year over year growth, while the overall storage market declined as did Dell EMC, NetApp, and Pure Storage.”

HPE said it continues to be positive in its market outlook as “businesses of all sizes accelerate their digital transformation initiatives coming through the COVID-19 pandemic.”

In fact, HPE said, “infrastructure matters in digital transformation and HPE offers a unique, industry leading portfolio of servers that stretch from edge to exascale-class systems to address customer requirements.”

The HPE gains come even with Dell Technologies coming off a record-breaking fiscal year 2021, generating revenues of $94.2 billion, up 2 percent year over year. Dell’s Infrastructure Solutions Group, which includes server, storage and hyperconverged infrastructure, reported $32.6 billion in annual sale, down 4 percent compared to fiscal year 2020.

Paul Cohen, vice president of sales for New York-based PKA Technologies, No. 429 on the CRN 2020 Solution Provider 500, said the share gains are a result of HPE being “extremely aggressive” with “demo-units, proof of concept marketing and investment” in the channel. “All those things are helping us win,” he said.

PKA recently closed a blockbuster compute and storage dHCI deal with National Tree Company, a Cranford, New Jersey manufacturer of artificial holiday décor.

Cohen said the business outcome led to a 70 percent in production for the customer and eliminated backorders. “This is the power our customers are realizing from HPE cutting-edge technologies,” he said.

“Our sales pipeline continues to see healthy growth particularly with dHCI, Nimble and HPE GreenLake consumption opportunities,” said Cohen.

HPE attributed the share gains to investments in software, solutions and services. “HPE is enabling organizations to accelerate time-to-value and seamlessly scale experiences from the edge, to core, to cloud,” the company said. “HPE also continues to differentiate by offering workload optimized compute solutions for organizations such as federal and public sector agencies, healthcare, and banking and financial services, And with HPE GreenLake, customers can run HPE compute from the edge to advanced high-performing servers in an elastic, pay-per-use, as-a-service platform.”