IDC’s latest Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker has
revealed that even though overall revenues are growing,
state-of-the-art management techniques such as virtualisation are
putting the brakes on server growth in the volume
sector.
The research firm says that factory revenue in the worldwide
server market grew 3.5% year over year to $12.9bn in the third
quarter of 2006, the fastest growth rate in four quarters and the
largest third quarter spending on servers since the same period in
2000. It adds that server blades were the main driver for worldwide
demand, with year-over-year growth of 29.9%.
High-end enterprise server revenue grew 9.1% year-over-year,
which represented the primary growth engine for the server market
overall and, says IDC, is the first positive growth for the segment
since the third quarter of 2004.
The firm believes that the growing use of virtualisation was the
driver for slower growth in the volume server market in the third
quarter, with spending growing 3.8% year-over-year, the fourth
consecutive quarter of single-digit growth and the slowest growth
since the third quarter on 2002.
Revenue for midrange enterprise servers declined 2.3%
year-over-year, marking the fourth consecutive quarterly decrease
in that segment.
The firm found a year-over-year unit shipment growth of 7.4%,
the ninth consecutive quarter of slowing overall shipment growth.
IDC says that the trend reflects moderating unit growth in the
volume server segment as server virtualisation and consolidation
continue to gain a foothold with mainstream IT users worldwide.
In terms of vendors, Microsoft Windows server revenues grew 4.6%
year-over-year and quarterly factory revenue of $4.8bn for Windows
servers represented the largest single segment of the server
market. Linux server revenue was $1.5bn for the quarter as
growth
continues to moderate, with year-over-year revenue growth of 5.4%.
Unix servers experienced a 1.7% decline in factory revenue
year-over-year.
Worldwide Unix revenues of more than $3.9bn for the quarter
represented 30.1% of overall quarterly factory revenue. In the x86
market segment, AMD-based server revenue grew 79.7% year-over-year,
accounting for 19.8% of all worldwide x86 server revenue in the
quarter.
Intel gained x86 market share sequentially for the first time in
four years and Intel-branded processors maintained 80.2% of all x86
server spending in the quarter. EPIC/Itanium-based systems grew
23.8% year-over-year, generating more than $700m in revenue for the
second consecutive quarter and now representing 11.2% of all
non-x86
server revenue.
By vendor, IBM maintained the number-one spot in the worldwide
server systems market with 33.1% market share in factory revenue,
growing its revenue by 6.6% when compared with the same quarter one
year ago. HP continued to hold the number-two spot in terms of
factory revenue with 27.7% share, a 2.1% year-over-year revenue
decline.
Dell and Sun ended the third quarter in a statistical tie for
the number-three position. Dell experienced 3.8% year-over-year
revenue growth in 3Q 2006 and captured 10.5% market share for the
quarter. Sun captured 10.0% market share in 3Q 2006 on the basis of
strong year-over-year revenue growth of 15.8%.
In terms of unit shipments, HP maintained the number-one
position worldwide with 28.8% server shipment share, growing
shipments 7.6% year-over-year. Dell maintained the number-two spot
in terms of worldwide server shipments with 24.6% share, up from
23.9% share in 3Q05.