Dell Technologies can now claim server king status, according to IDC’s latest numbers, which put it at No. 1 in both revenue and units shipped. Server sales also helped propel the company’s surging revenue in its first fiscal quarter of 2019.
For the quarter, which ended May 4, revenue was $21.4 billion, up 19 percent compared to last year, and non-GAAP operating income rose 42 percent to $2 billion. This was largely driven by servers, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) sales, and VMware revenue.
Meanwhile, net losses dropped to $538 million, compared to $1.2 billion for the same quarter last year.
The company also paid down about $600 million of core debt, ending the quarter with a balance of $39.8 billion. After the quarter ended, however, Dell paid down another $2.5 billion of core debt, bringing its gross debt paid down to $13 billion since it merged with EMC in 2016.
The company’s Infrastructure Solutions Group, which is the Dell EMC business unit that includes storage, servers, and networking equipment, reported $8.7 billion in revenue for the first quarter, a 25-percent increase. This includes a 41 percent year-over-year growth in servers and networking to $4.6 billion, and 10-percent growth in storage to $4.1 billion.
Double-digit growth for both PowerEdge and Cloud servers drove the company’s sixth consecutive quarter of sever-revenue growth. Additionally, the company’s HCI VxRail and VxRack products both saw triple-digit growth.
Dell EMC also tops IDC’s HCI hardware revenue ranking, while sister company VMware leads HCI software vendors.
“Hyperconverged, software-defined, and mid-range are areas where we have made significant investments over the past year, including several $100 million on sales capacity and R&D around hyperconverged infrastructure and software-defined data center,” said Jeff Clark, vice chairman of products and operations at Dell, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript.
Storage revenue grew 10 percent, hitting $4.1 billion. Dell said it expects to gain market share in storage when first calendar quarter of 2018 industry numbers are final, which would mark the first quarter of storage share gain since closing the EMC deal.
And, as reported last week, VMware segment revenue for the first quarter was $2 billion, up 12 percent, with operating income of $613 million, or 30.2 percent of revenue. Dell owns about 80 percent of VMware, which it acquired during the Dell-EMC transaction.
Dell Server Revenue Up, HPE Down
Also late last week IDC published its most recent quarterly server tracker, which showed Dell EMC extended its lead as the No. 1 provider in both server revenue and server units shipped globally.
For the entire server market, Dell EMC saw the largest revenue growth of any top five vendor, with a 50.6 percent year-over-year growth rate, faster than the overall market (38.6 percent).
The company’s sever leadership includes 19.1 percent of overall revenue share, and 20.7 percent for x86 revenue only.
Dell EMC also led with 20.6 percent of all server units shipped globally for the first quarter. That was 29-percent higher and shipping 125,000 more x86 server units than No. 2 Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Its rival experienced a 6.9-percent loss year over year while Dell EMC grew 18.9 percent in year-over-year shipments. For x86 units only Dell EMC’s share was 20.8 percent compared to HPE’s 16.1 percent.