Worldwide server shipments in 2006 totalled 8.2 million
in 2006, an 8.9% increase from 2005, said analyst
Gartner.
In addition, worldwide server revenue in 2006 reached £26.8bn,
which was a modest 2% increase on 2005, said the analyst.
Gartner said EMEA server shipments were below average growth at
6.8%, particularly affected by a slow fourth quarter.
Jeffrey Hewitt, a Gartner analyst, said, "The fourth quarter of
the year exhibited slower growth in x86 servers than we have seen
in most recent years, which constrained the results for the year as
a whole.”
He said, “Most of that slowdown seems to be attributable to a
lengthening of the sales cycle due to the anticipated introduction
of quad-core x86 processors, with some lesser impact from x86
server virtualisation.”
RISC-Itanium Unix servers were weak for the year on a global
basis, falling 1.6% in shipments and 0.8% in terms of revenue, said
Gartner. Mainframes had the strongest revenue growth of any segment
for the year, up 3.9% on 2005.
IBM continued to lead the worldwide server market based on
revenue in 2006, ahead of HP, and Sun Microsystems in third
place.
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