Dell Dominates HPE In Q4 Server And Storage Market Share
Dell Technologies is on fire. The now-public company extended its dominance in both the worldwide server and storage market in the fourth quarter of 2018, according to research firm IDC, gaining market share year over year over its main competitor Hewlett Packard Enterprise to remain the global infrastructure leader.
“You’re seeing a huge infiltration of the Dell compute platform where they weren’t before,” said Scott Winslow, president of Winslow Technology Group, a Waltham, Mass.-based Dell Titanium partner and 2018 CRN Triple Crown Award winner. “Before Dell’s acquisition of EMC, they really didn’t have a server platform in large accounts. They were partnering with Cisco and doing some VCE, and they still do that, but now you’ve got the strongest of the Dell and EMC sales reps on that enterprise sales team – Bill Scannell, Chris Riley, etc. -- at Dell now with a server platform to sell. What we’re seeing is in these large accounts is now all of a sudden they’re starting to add Dell servers and switching over, for example, from HPE. … So it’s a two-part story for their increase in server and storage. One part is the technology. The other part is the sales story.”
For the fourth quarter 2018, Dell captured 18.7 percent global share of server market, up from 17.5 percent year over year, according to new data from IDC. The Round Rock, Texas-based infrastructure giant generated a whopping $4.43 billion in server revenue, representing a more than 20 percent sales jump from $3.68 billion Dell made in fourth quarter 2017.
The second biggest server vendor, HPE, saw a 10.5 percent increase year over year in revenues to $4.2 billion in the fourth quarter 2018. However, HPE’s overall server share dropped from 18.1 percent in the fourth quarter 2017 to 17.8 percent.
Looking at IDC’s fourth quarter 2018 worldwide storage numbers, Dell captured 20.6 percent share, up from 19.3 percent share year over year. Dell generated nearly $3 billion in total storage sales, up 15 percent compared to the same quarter one year ago.
HPE’s global storage sales were flat year over year with approximately $2.6 billion in total revenue in the fourth quarter 2018. In terms of year over year worldwide storage market share, HPE fell from 19.2 percent share to 18 percent in the fourth quarter 2018.
Winslow said Dell’s broad storage and serer portfolio is winning deals for his company over HPE, including a recent healthcare organization that added Dell servers for the first time that had previously bought HPE.
“Dell has the technology there in spades – whether its blade technology, rack technology, a phenomenal hyper-converged portfolio, a full portfolio for structured and unstructured data -- and they continue to improve on it under Jeff Clarke,” said Winslow, adding that his company’s Dell business is up 43 percent year over year.
Winslow said Dell’s surge in market share over the past several quarters is also helping to win over HPE customers. “We show this market share graph to customers saying, ‘Hey is this not the evidence you need to take a look as part of your due diligence to see what Dell’s doing in the server market place? Because the numbers don’t lie,’” he said. “The market is speaking and the market is saying that the share is shifting away from organizations like HPE and going to Dell. We show them an eighth-quarter rolling average of the server market share and we’ve been able to land a lot of meetings.”
Rounding out the top five global server market leaders is IBM in third place with 8.3 percent server share, Inspur at 6.6 percent and Lenovo with 6.3 percent share. Total server revenues worldwide reached $23.6 billion in the fourth quarter 2018, up 12.6 percent year over year.
The global enterprise storage market hit $14.5 billion in the fourth quarter of 2018, up 7.4 percent year over year. NetApp came in third place with 5.8 percent storage share, followed by IBM at 4.8 percent, Huawei at 4 percent and Lenovo with 3.5 percent.