In the third quarter of 2017, worldwide server revenue increased 16% year-over-year, while shipments grew 5.1% from the second quarter of 2016, according to Gartner, Inc. (www.gartner.com).

"The third quarter of 2017 produced continued growth on a global level with varying regional results," said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at the research group. "A build-out of infrastructure to support cloud and hybrid-cloud implementations was the main driver for growth in the server market for the period.”

x86 servers increased 5.3% in shipments for the year and 16.7 % in revenue in the third quarter of 2017. RISC/Itanium Unix servers declined globally, down 23.5% in shipments and 18.3 percent in vendor revenue compared with the same quarter last year. The “other” CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, showed a decline/increase of 54.5%.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) continued to lead in the worldwide server market based on revenue. Despite a decline of 3.2%, the company posted $3.1 billion in revenue for a total share of 21% for the third quarter of 2017.

Dell EMC maintained the No. 2 position with 37.9% growth and 20.8% market share. Inspur Electronics experienced the highest growth in the quarter with 116%, driven by ongoing sales into China-based cloud providers, as well as global expansion efforts.