Dell beats HPE to become global market leader in server sales

After over two decades of selling servers, Dell Technologies, for the first time, has become the undisputed leader in both units and revenue for servers worldwide, in the first quarter (January-March) of the calendar year 2018, said a top executive of the company.

Dell has also emerged the leader in the India server market with an overall market share of 28.3 per cent in the first quarter, up from 19.4 per cent in Q4 of calendar year 2017, as per IDC data, driven predominantly by spending from manufacturing, telcos, government and banking verticals.

“From a global ranking of No.2, in both units and revenue for servers in 2016, Dell has emerged the undisputed No. 1 in both units and revenue as per IDC data, for the first time since we started shipping servers a little over two decades ago. We relish this position and take pride in it,” Ravi Pendekanti, Senior Vice-President, Server Solutions Product Management and Marketing at Dell EMC, told BusinessLine on a recent visit to India.

IDC data for the first quarter of the calendar year 2018 place Dell in pole position in the global server market with 20.7 per cent revenue market share compared to HPE’s 19.4 per cent and 20.8 per cent market share in units sold compared to HPE’s 16.1 per cent.

Historically, Dell was close to becoming market leader in the worldwide server market in the late 1990s/early 2000s, but was set back by nearly two decades when market leader HP decided to merge with Compaq in a multi-billion dollar merger agreement, in September 2001.

“India is one of our top 10 countries for server sales worldwide. When we are shipping servers to over 200 countries, to be in the top 10 means a lot. The India growth story is phenomenal and we don’t see it slowing down anytime soon,” said Pendekanti.

Will Dell be able to maintain its global and India market leadership over the next few quarters? “While it’s good news for Dell as of Q1 of 2018, Dell needs to establish its leadership position for at least the next 3-4 consecutive quarters,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, Chief Analyst, Greyhound Research.

Reason behind the success

On what it took to beat HPE, Pendekanti said, “We have adopted the approach of coming in with the right feature-functionality for specific market segments, instead of taking a cookie-cutter approach of building a server that meets every customer need. For instance, the company launched the PowerEdge R940xa server, where xa stands for extreme acceleration, to cater to the needs of a growing market for Machine Learning and Deep Learning workloads, because we are now seeing a lot of interest for these technologies from the financial sector, life sciences/bio-sciences companies and the oil & gas sector.”

He pointed out that when the market was talking about RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability) with customers, Dell was talking about PARIS (Price/Performance, Availability, Reliability, Interoperability, Security). “We have integrated security built into our servers, we offer interoperability as we know customers buy from multiple vendors, and the best performance at the right price.”