NEEDHAM, MA – Worldwide server market revenue declined 2.5% year-over-year to $23.6 billion during the second quarter, according to the International Data Corp. Worldwide server shipments surpassed 3.2 million during the period, an increase of 0.1% over the previous year.

Volume server revenue was up 5.6% to nearly $20 billion. Midrange server revenue declined 30% to $2.4 billion, and high-end servers declined 32.7% to $1.3 billion.

"Broadly speaking, server market performance was muted in the second quarter as the market shifted slightly toward single-socket server configurations," said Paul Maguranis, senior research analyst, Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies, IDC. "While servers purchased directly from ODMs declined year-over-year, some past backlog recovery within the hyperscale data center community contributed to a large jump in this segment compared to the first quarter of this year."

HPE/H3C ended the quarter in a statistical tie with Dell for the top position in the worldwide market. The revenue shares for the two companies were 15.7% and 15.6%, respectively. Inspur/Inspur Power Systems ranked third, with 9.4% revenue share. Lenovo was in fourth place, while IBM came in fifth, with 7% share and 5% share, respectively.

The ODM direct group of vendors accounted for 26.7% of total server revenue and declined 8.8% year-over-year to $6.3 billion, while accounting for 32.2% of all units shipped during the quarter.

On a geographic basis, Asia/Pacific (excluding China and Japan) revenue was up 8.6% year-over-year. Server revenue in China grew 3.4% over the previous year, while Japan declined 21.2%. Latin America revenue grew 4.6%. North America revenue declined 5.7%, and Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) revenue declined 2.3% year-over-year.

Revenue generated from x86 servers decreased 2.2% to $21.4 billion. Non-x86 server revenue declined 4.5% to around $2.3 billion.