According to International Data Corporation (IDC), overall server market in India surged by 19.2 percent in CY 2015, with 157,061 units shipped in 2015 as against 131,695 units in CY 2014. Q4 2015 witnessed 32,853 server units shipped, down by 16.2 percent over the previous quarter. However, with each of the previous two quarters observing a demand spike in the range of 39,000-51000 units, CY 2015 proved to be landmark year in terms of overall compute demand in India.
Nation-wide 4G roll outs and the entry of globally established cloud services providers continued to drive the compute demand through the last three quarters of CY 2015. Initiatives such as ‘Digital India’ and Nasscom’s ‘10,000 Startups’ further augmented the incubation of several start-ups, indirectly augmenting the compute demand. Taking cues from the influx of a widely diversifying e-commerce ecosystem, home-grown hosting service providers further contributed to the compute demand by ramping up their existing infrastructure for enhanced offerings.
The non x86 server market grew by 42 percent year-on-year in terms of unit shipments and 59 percent in terms of revenue in Q4 2015. Bank expansions and increasing number of migrations to HANA (High Performance Analytical Appliance) primarily contributed to this bolstering growth. With the on-going 4G roll-outs, Communications & Media vertical continued to be a prominent contributor to this growth.
According to Ruchika Kakkar, Server Market Analyst, “India is being eyed as an important business hub, thereby drawing continued investments from global cloud service providers and OEMs. Next few quarters are expected to see favourable compute demand as cloud service providers continue to expand their local data centres across the country. 4G investments are expected to grow in parallel as the telecom infrastructure ecosystem continues to evolve in India.”
According to Gaurav Sharma, Research Manager, Enterprise & IPDS, “Compute demand is expected to surge ahead in the wake of 3rdplatform technologies getting increased adoption and acceptance. As the ecosystem (mobility, social and analytics) expands itself into B2B & B2C use cases, compute would demand earlier than expected refresh / augment cycles resulting in increased demand and efficiency of such technologies. ”
Major Vendors
- In India x86 market, HP maintained its lead position in Q4 2015 with 36 percent market share in terms of unit shipment, followed by Dell with a market share of 24 percent.
- Lenovo’s market share dropped from 18 percent to 12 percent year-on-year.
- White box providers witnessed 1 percent market share gain, up from 13 percent in Q4 2014 to 14 percent in Q4 2015, in terms of absolute unit shipment.
- Cisco’s market share dropped by 1 percent year-on-year, however witnessed 6 percent year-on-year growth in terms of absolute unit shipment.
On the revenue front, HP led with 47 percent market share, followed by Dell at 24 percent market share. Lenovo held 12 percent market share, followed by Cisco and white box providers at 6 percent and 3 percent, respectively.
