Hardware commoditisation among servers, storage and networking is set to increase further in 2015 says research. “Functionality and value in the data centre hardware market are increasingly shifting to software, which is shrinking the hardware market’s profit pool,” said TBR Data centre Senior Analyst Scott Dennehy. “The vendor landscape is beginning to shift as vendors adjust their strategies for future longevity. Furthermore, we anticipate that OEMs will be increasingly forced to choose between market share and profitability, demonstrated by IBM’s gross margin surge after it exited the x86 server market.”
Server, storage and networking hardware revenue for the vendors tracked in TBR’s Data centre Benchmark increased 1% year-to-year in 4Q14. TBR attributes average data centre hardware revenue growth to recent portfolio refreshes in the industry-standard server market based on Intel’s “Grantley” platform. However, opportunities for OEMs to differentiate on hardware will be increasingly limited in 2015. TBR’s report discusses how OEMs are adapting their go-to-market and portfolio approaches to capture evolving revenue opportunities that centre increasingly on software-centric cloud, analytics and mobile solutions.
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