Computer server makers are enjoying the fruits of a very prosperous year, with both shipments and revenues growing nicely over the previous 12 months.

Worldwide shipments of servers grew about 3 percent in 2017, while revenue was up more than 10 percent from 2016, according to Gartner Inc.’s latest figures released Thursday. Meanwhile, the last quarter of 2017 saw even bigger growth, with shipments up almost 9 percent and revenue growing by nearly 26 percent.

“Server growth was driven by relatively strong economies for the quarter across the globe,” Jeffrey Hewitt, a Gartner research vice president, said in a statement. “This was a somewhat surprising quarter because the strength was exhibited in a variety of positive server shipment and revenue mixes in almost all geographies.”

A quick look at the regional stats explains why. The North America and Asia Pacific regions both saw double-digit revenue growth in the last quarter, up 28 percent and 35 percent, respectively. Shipments also jumped, by almost 10 percent in North America and 21 percent in Asia Pacific.

But the results were less impressive elsewhere in the world. The Europe, Middle East and Africa region saw fourth quarter revenue grow by 20 percent, though shipments actually declined by 8 percent. That discrepancy was thanks to the rising cost of semiconductors, in particular dynamic random access memory chips, Gartner’s research director Adrian O’Connell told Computer Weekly. “The main driver for the revenue growth remains the increasing cost of certain components due to supply shortages, with vendors passing that cost increase on to users,” he said.

In Latin America, both revenue and shipments were down in the fourth quarter, by 3 percent and a little under 5 percent, respectively.

The two biggest server makers, Dell Technologies Inc.’s Dell EMC and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co. were locked in a fierce battle for market dominance during the quarter. Dell EMC came out on top, but only just, with a 19.4 percent share of the market, almost equal to HPE’s 19.3 percent. According to Gartner, it was Dell EMC that saw larger growth in the quarter, with revenue up by 40 percent to HPE’s 5.5 percent.

The good news for both companies is that Gartner reckons that growth in the market will continue throughout this year. “The outlook for 2018 suggests that modest growth will continue, with enterprise end users taking an ongoing hybrid approach to both on-premises and public cloud choices based on their server application objectives,” Hewitt said.

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