Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) may have reduced their capital spending in 2015, but that did not effect the global server market too much -- it grew 7 percent during the year. Dell'Oro Group said that this was the largest gain the market has seen since 2011, when the market was overcoming the fallout of a global recession. The research firm noted that shipments to Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) rose while shipments to Google and Amazon "paused" during the year.
"Revenue growth in 2015 was driven by richer configuration of Grantley-based enterprise servers and IBM's Z13 refresh cycle, which started early in the year. In contrast, unit shipment growth continues to be driven mainly by Cloud data center deployments," said Sameh Boujelbene, director at Dell'Oro Group, in a release. "Nevertheless, Cloud server shipment growth slowed in 2015 as some of the leading Cloud providers, namely Google and Amazon, paused CAPEX spend during the year."
Boujelbene added that Dell'Oro sees two issues that could drive up server shipments: cloud providers increasing capital spending and more enterprises increasing cloud adoption as the macro economy weakens. Release