IDC and Gartner released worldwide server market results for the first quarter of 2008, with both analyst firms documenting growth in the market overall despite a slowdown in the U.S. economy and an increase in server virtualization technology.

Approximately 2 million servers were shipped during the quarter, with slightly more than 7 percent growth in unit shipments noted by both analysts, indicating a healthy demand for servers.

IDC

"The server market continues to experience solid growth as businesses of all types focus on expanding and refreshing their IT infrastructures for both traditional and emerging cloud-based workload," said Matt Eastwood, group vice president of Enterprise Platforms at IDC. "Geographically, the Americas was the weakest region with an overall revenue decline driven in part by a slowing U.S. economy. However, it is also clear that positive exchange rates are helping drive positive server revenue growth in EMEA and Asia/Pacific. Technology suppliers will need to be careful not to become too dependent on this short-term economic boost."

Sun was one of only three vendors that grew factory revenue during this period in the x86 server space, gaining market share in the process. Sun demonstrated a 26.2 percent increase, IDC reported, followed by Dell with 9.4 percent and Fujitsu/FSC with 7.9 percent.

In the non-x86 server market, including servers based on RISC, EPIC, and CISC processors, Sun took third place with a 19.5 percent share of this market segment based on factory revenue, according to IDC. IBM with 41.9 percent and Hewlett Packard with 22.7 percent took the top spots in this area.

Looking at the worldwide server market, IDC found Sun's revenues declined 1.8 percent year-over-year for the first quarter of 2008 with a 10.5 percent revenue share.

Gartner

Gartner's take on the continued growth in the server market stems from the demand of particular servers for specific application use, such as Web servers, as well as customers buying newer hardware to run their server virtualization.

"Customers are buying larger servers to host virtualization," said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner, as reported by ChannelWeb's Joseph F. Kovar. "This market is so hungry for more and more horsepower. Virtualization makes it easier to host more and faster applications."

Sun ranked fourth in the number of most servers shipped during the first quarter of 2008 with 3.7 percent of the total worldwide shipments, according to Gartner, which also reported the vendor claiming the number four spot in worldwide server revenue, even with the company's revenue dip from the previous year. Sun's revenue dropped as its focus continues to shift more towards x86-based servers and less from its notable Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS), claimed Hewitt. [...read more...]

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