White box servers stand to gain from cloud providers' demands

REDWOOD CITY, USA: Dell'Oro Group's recently released report says indicates that white box server vendors, who were the first to move to 10 Gbps on their stand-alone servers, accounted for nearly 10 percent of server shipments in 3Q13.

"White Box server vendors' ability to provide customized servers at compelling prices handed them a distinct competitive advantage in the cloud and service provider segments," said Sameh Boujelbene, senior analyst at Dell'Oro Group.

"While server shipment growth overall is slowing down, we expect servers shipping to the cloud and service providers to top 20 percent by 2013, and to approach 50 percent by 2017. Server vendors, along with other system and component vendors who are able to position themselves in these growing segments, will fair better than the market moving forward," said Boujelbene.

"As servers, storage and networking converge, and as server form factors are evolving, the networking element of the server is becoming increasingly important," said Tam Dell'Oro, president of Dell'Oro Group.

"In North America, we see a very tight correlation between vendors' ability to gain share and their ability to move to higher speeds to answer the requirements of the growing segments of the market, namely cloud and service provider. We do expect to see regional differences as cloud growth shifts away from North America and towards China," said Dell'Oro.