Published in August 27th, 2007
IDC reports that revenue in the worldwide server market rose by 6.3 percent to $13.1 billion in this year's second quarter, with respect to the year-ago period.
ADVERTISEMENT "The server market not only continues to experience solid growth, but revenue growth has accelerated over the past seven quarters," observed IDC's Enterprise Platforms vice president Matt Eastwood.
For the most part, according to Eastwood, growth is being driven by a broad-based move among enterprises to adopt new distributed-computing workload configurations. The new enterprise focus on fostering business growth increasingly requires "both scale-up consolidated systems and scale-out distributed configurations to meet very different workload needs in today's enterprise," he said.
Dell Makes Headway
IDC noted that server sales in the under $25,000 category grew by a robust 11 percent with respect to the year-ago reporting period. By contrast, revenue from midrange enterprise servers essentially remained flat at 0.2 percent growth, and with high-end enterprise servers showing a minor 1.7 percent bump up from one year earlier.
IBM, as expected, held onto its No. 1 status overall by capturing a 31 percent share of the market. Big Blue was able to leverage the popularity of its System x, System z, and System p servers to increase factory revenue by 6.4 percent.
But the market's biggest surprise story in the quarter came from No. 4 Dell, which grew its factory revenue by an impressive 20.2 percent with respect to the year-ago period — the most robust growth of any leading vendor. The embattled server-maker will no doubt be pointing this out to investors as a sign that its new enterprise strategy is making some headway.
Blade Sales Accelerate
Blade servers continued to be the fastest-growing segment of the worldwide server market, noted IDC research analyst Jed Scaramella. During the second quarter, blade-server revenue grew by 36.7 percent to $875 million.
"IDC believes blades are in the next wave of product evolution and customer adoption," Scaramella said. "As I.T. organizations become more familiar with the platform, they are able to deploy blades in I.T. environments that are suited to take advantage of the management capabilities, as well as the cost and serviceability benefits."
Hewlett-Packard maintained its market-leading position in the blade server segment by growing its revenue by 71.9 percent year-over-year. The company currently holds 47.2 percent market share, which is 9.7 points above its revenue market share from just one year earlier.
Windows Rules
The sale of Linux-based servers rose by 19 percent to $1.8 billion in the quarter. However, the open-source system still has a long way to go to catch up with Microsoft's Windows server revenue, which grew by 18.7 percent to $5.0 billion and a market-leading 38.2 percent revenue share in the quarter.
By contrast, revenue growth in the Unix server category declined by 4 percent with respect to the year-earlier period. However, due to continuing success in the high-end segment, Unix revenues totaled $4.2 billion in the quarter, which was good enough for a 31.7 percent share of the worldwide server market.
"While we still believe that spending for Unix-based servers will decline over time, the competition for leadership" between the Unix market's top suppliers "is expected to remain heated for some time," said IDC's Enterprise Platforms research director Steve Josselyn.
