Sales of
Linux-based servers decreased by 1.8% over the year, the first
time this operating system has suffered a dip in revenue since the
first quarter of 2002, according to analyst IDC's second quarter
EMEA Quarterly Server Tracker 2008.
Beatriz Valle, research analyst at IDC, said, "Corporates have
been replacing their legacy systems and they have not been
migrating to Linux x86 servers." Instead, she said enterprise users
have been buying scalable Risc and Itanium-based hardware and
mainframes.
The sales figures also show that IT directors are struggling to
make the most of whatever budget is left over at the end of the
year. Sales of high-end servers and IBM z-series mainframes were
particularly high, suggesting that IT directors in major companies
used their remaining budget in the last quarter of 2007 to buy
mainframes and other high priced server hardware.
During the quarter, sales of IBM's System z mainframes grew
47.3%, while Fujitsu Siemens' BS2000 mainframes grew 21.5%
demonstrating that users were
not replacing legacy mainframes with Unix, Linxu and
Windows-based servers.
Valle said, "These are uncertain times and IT managers are
expecting their budgets to be squeezed even more in the coming
quarters."
She said businesses were buying these big server boxes to
support scalability and virtualisation. "Companies still see
scalable servers with high availability as a future-proof
investment, while they wait for virtualisation on x86 to mature
further."
Overall, HP sold the most servers with a revenue of £6.3bn IBM
was second with £800m Sun was third with £316m and Dell was fourth
with £233m in server sales.