Servers are the key component of enterprise computing infrastructure. If we look at the last few years, the market was impacted by recessionary trends. Only last year, the market began to pick up because of the trends such as digital and cloud. As we take an audit of the year went by, the x86 servers saw aggressive growth. The overall server market in India witnessed a year-over-year (YOY) increase of 92.4% in terms of revenue to reach $371.4 million in Q4 2017 versus $193.1 million in Q4 2016, according to the latest IDC Asia-Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) Quarterly Server Tracker, Q4 2017. The x86 server market accounted for 86.7% of the overall server revenue during Q4 2017, with growth being majorly driven by spending from professional services, government, telcos, and banks.


The Q4 2017 quarter has been record-breaking for both non-x86 and x86 server product categories. Non-x86 platform remains at the top of mind for many end-users looking for data workloads such as databases, data warehouses, transaction processing, and high-performance computing. Banks are the primary buyers in this category and high availability with minimum downtime, maximum uptime are key considerations.

The non-x86 server market grew by 115.6% YOY in terms of revenue to reach $49.6 million in Q4 2017. In terms of revenue, IBM leads the market, accounting for 47.8% of market share, followed closely by HPE with its share of 44.7% during Q4 2017. In the non-x86 server market, the banking industry continues to dominate and accounts for 55.9% of the revenue, followed by government with 21.1% and manufacturing with 7.4%.

The x86 server market in terms of revenue witnessed a YOY growth of 89.3% to reach $321.9 million in Q4 2017, up from $170.1 million during Q4 2016. The growth was majorly driven by professional services, government, banking and telecommunications, while manufacturing continues to witness growth for the straight third quarter. Blade and rack optimized servers together accounted for 75.1% of the overall x86 server market by revenues during Q4 2017. In the x86 product category, 99.7% were Intel-based processors sold in the volume, mid-range and small server segment.

In the Indian x86 market, HPE leads the Indian server market with 32.8% in Q4 2017. The major deals for HPE came from telecommunications and professional services verticals. Dell successfully increased its market share to 19.4% during Q4 2017, while Cisco accounted for 6.6% of market share winning deals across different verticals. Cray successfully closed the deal with Central Government on supercomputer project and grabbed the market share of 9.3%, whereas ODM direct market share declined to 21.2% in Q4 2017.

“Traditional three tier architectures are still at the mainstream of India enterprise infra market. We have seen professional services, and telcos as early adopters and innovators towards adoption of virtualization and using HCI approach for their DC strategy. New-age workloads such as IoT, big data analytics, and AI are still at a nascent stage and requires significant efforts from vendors and OEM ecosystem towards educating the end-users and its business outcomes,” says Harshal Udatewar, Server Market Analyst, IDC India.