STAMFORD, CT – In the third quarter, worldwide server revenue increased 16% year-over-year, while shipments grew 5.1%, says Gartner.

"The third quarter of 2017 produced continued growth on a global level with varying regional results," said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner. "A buildout of infrastructure to support cloud and hybrid-cloud implementations was the main driver for growth in the server market for the period.

"x86 servers increased 5.3% in shipments for the year and 16.7% in revenue in the third quarter of 2017. RISC/Itanium Unix servers declined globally, down 23.5% in shipments and 18.3% in vendor revenue compared with the same quarter last year. The 'other' CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, showed an increase of 54.5%."

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) continued to lead in the worldwide server market based on revenue. Despite a decline of 3.2%, the company posted $3.1 billion in revenue, for a total share of 21% for the third quarter of 2017.

Dell EMC maintained the No. 2 position, with 37.9% growth and 20.8% market share.

Inspur Electronics experienced the highest growth in the quarter, with 116.6%, driven by ongoing sales into China-based cloud providers, as well as global expansion efforts.