Report: Cloud providers taking lion's share of overall server market

In a recently published report from Dell’Oro Group, the networking and telecommunications industry analyst says that its latest data reveals that the major cloud providers comprised a record portion of the server market in the first quarter 2014, due to a significant increase in their consumption of white box servers.

“In North America, 17 percent of server shipments were white box, and we estimate that over a quarter of all server shipments were destined for cloud providers,” reports Alan Weckel, vice president at Dell’Oro Group. “While many cloud providers contributed to the strong results, we believe the “big four” -- Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft -- are reaching the point where their purchasing is so large that they can have a significant influence on the overall market,” he adds.

Related: Report: Ethernet Switch market drops nearly $1 billion

Dell’Oro claims that its Server Quarterly Market Share Report is the first of its kind to examine servers from a networking perspective. The new report closely tracks several key areas of the market, including the migration to higher server access speeds (25 Gbps vs. 40 Gbps).

The report's in-depth coverage includes tables covering manufacturers’ revenue, unit, and port shipments for blade, high-density and stand-alone servers. Information on network attach rates (1 GE, 10 GE, 40 GE, 100 GE and future port speeds), virtualization attach rates and VM density is also provided. Common equipment overlap between storage, servers and switching is broken out, as well as white box versus traditional enterprise server shipments.

Learn more about the report.

More analysis: Report finds WLAN infrastructure sales sputter as 802.11ac takes hold