According to IDC’s latest Worldwide Quarterly Server
Tracker, volume server revenue is continuing to represent the only
growth segment for the server market overall.
The survey
found that factory revenue in the worldwide server market grew at
0.6% year on year to reach $12.3bn in the second quarter 2006,
marking a return to positive overall revenue growth for the first
time since the third quarter last year. Volume server revenue grew
6.2% year on year, representing this beacon of hope for the overall
server market. Unit shipment growth grew 8.3% year on year in the
second quarter 2006, the eighth consecutive quarter of slowing
overall shipment growth.
IDC says the
trend reflects moderating unit growth in the volume server segment,
as comparisons with year-ago quarters become more difficult and as
server virtualisation gains a foothold with mainstream IT
users.
The research
company also found that even though the brakes have been applied to
the growth of the Linux market, such technology accounted for 12%
of all server revenue. Unix servers experienced 1.6% revenue
decline year on year as unit shipments declined 1.8% when compared
with the second quarter 2005. Worldwide, Unix revenues were $4.3bn
for the quarter, representing 35% of quarterly server spending and
reflecting continued IT investment.
Windows
servers showed positive growth as revenues grew 3.1% and unit
shipments grew 11% year on year. IDC says that customers are
deploying more fully configured Windows servers as part of server
consolidation and virtualisation initiatives, which is
going some way toward driving this growth.
The much criticised Itanium-based systems market actually grew
36.4% year on year, generating more than $740m in revenue for the
quarter and now representing 11.7% of all non-x86 server revenue.
In the x86 market segment, AMD’s Opteron processor accounted for
20.2% of all worldwide x86 server revenue for the first time in the
second quarter 2006.