STAMFORD, CT -- Third quarter worldwide server shipments grew 1% year-over-year, while revenue rose 1.7% from a year ago, according to Gartner.

"The third quarter produced modest growth on a global level, highlighting positive but constrained demand," said 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%, with a 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 percent in vendor revenue, and the Middle East and Africa posted a 5.2% decrease in shipments 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% in units and 7.4% in revenue in the third quarter," said Rasit. "RISC/Itanium Unix server shipments declined 17.1% globally for the period and declined 8% 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 quarter (Table 1). The company posted nearly $3.4 billion in server revenue to account for 26.9% of worldwide server revenue. Cisco experienced the highest growth in the quarter at 30.8%.

Table 1. Worldwide: Server Vendor Revenue Estimates, 3Q14 (U.S. Dollars)

Source: Gartner (December 2014)

In server shipments, HP remained the worldwide leader in the period (Table 2) despite a year-over-year shipment decline of 14.9% for the quarter. Of the top five vendors in server shipments worldwide, all produced shipment increases except for HP and IBM.

Table 2. Worldwide Server Vendor Shipments Estimates, 3Q14 (Units)

Source: Gartner (December 2014)