In the third quarter of 2014, worldwide server shipments grew 1 percent year-over-year, while revenue moved upward 1.7% from the third quarter of 2013, according to Gartner (www.gartner.com).

"The third quarter of 2014 produced modest growth on a global level, highlighting positive but constrained demand," says Errol Rasit, research director at Gartner. "Only North America and Asia Pacific exhibited shipments growth, largely driven by demand from hyperscale organizations located there. These results support the continued bifurcation of enterprise and consumer services server demand."

The platform mix by region and geographic variations in economic conditions are the main reasons for these results. Asia/Pacific posted the highest shipment growth at 8.7% and 7.5% increase in revenue, while North America posted a more modest 0.7% in shipments and 2.6% increase in revenue. Western Europe saw a 2%shipments decrease, but a growth of 3.8% in revenue.

Eastern Europe fell 10.8% in shipments and 6.3% in vendor revenue, and the Middle East and Africa posted a 5.2% shipments decrease and 6.7% decrease in revenue. Japan declined 6.7% in shipments and 10.6% in vendor revenue, and Latin America dropped 6.3% in shipments and 4.1% in vendor revenue for the quarter.

"x86 servers managed to grow 1.2 percent in units and 7.4 percent in revenue in the third quarter of 2014," says Rasit. "RISC/Itanium Unix server shipments declined 17.1 percent globally for the period and declined 8.0 percent in vendor revenue compared with the same quarter last year."

Despite a decline of 0.9%, HP was the worldwide server market leader based on revenue in the third quarter of 2014. The company posted nearly US$3.4 billion in server revenue to account for 26.9% of worldwide server revenue. Cisco experienced the highest growth in the third quarter with 30.8%.