In the first quarter of 2015, worldwide server shipments grew 13 percent year over year, while revenue increased 17.9% from the first quarter of 2014, according to Gartner, Inc. (www.gartner.com). 

"The first quarter of 2015 was a particularly strong start to the year, with the strongest shipment growth since the third quarter of 2010, when the market was recovering from the downturn. It was also the second-largest-volume quarter ever," said Adrian O'Connell, research director at Gartner. "The market was driven by particularly strong demand from the hyperscale area, which benefited North America, in particular. This comes at a time when other regions are struggling, due to price pressure driven by the appreciation of the U.S. dollar. The strength in North America was strong enough to offset declines in Latin America and Japan. EMEA [Europe, the Middle East and Africa] was barely positive, with 1%volume growth." 

x86 server shipments increased 13.2% from the first quarter of 2014, and revenue increased 14.5%. RISC/Itanium Unix server shipments declined 2.9%, while revenue declined 3.1% compared with the same quarter last year. The "other" CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, showed an increase of 95.1% in terms of revenue," says O'Connell. 

HP maintained its No. 1 ranking in the worldwide server market based on revenue with 23.8 percent market share in the first quarter of 2015 (see Table 1). Lenovo experienced the largest increase in the first quarter of 2015 with 658.2 percent growth. All of the top five global vendors had revenue increases for the first quarter of 2015 except IBM.