May 28, 2008
Servers Jumped Up in 1Q08; HP, IBM at Top
Despite U.S. economic slowdown and server virtualization adoption - that optimizes the existing server infrastructure - the worldwide server market grew 3.5% year over year to $13 billion in the first quarter of this year, says market researcher IDC. More than 2 million servers were shipped for the second consecutive quarter and unit shipment growth was 7.8% year over year in 1Q08.

The IDC study says HP and IBM again finished the first quarter in a statistical tie (less than 1% difference) for the No. 1 position in the worldwide server market with 29.0% and 28.1% share respectively. HP’s growth was mainly due to its ProLiant, Integrity, and BladeSystem businesses. System z server business was the main contributor to IBM’s revenue growth. Dell’s factory revenue grew 9.4% year over year and it moved into the No. 3 position in the market with 12.3% share in the quarter. Sun’s revenues declined 1.8% year over year in the quarter ending with 10.5% share. Fujitsu/Fujitsu-Siemens maintained a fifth place in terms of factory revenue, with 6.3%.

IDC’s top-level server market findings reveal that Microsoft Windows server revenue was $5.1 billion in 1Q08 showing 4.2% year-over-year growth. Windows-based servers comprised 39.2% of all server revenue in 1Q08. Unix servers saw a modest -0.8% revenue drop compared with 1Q07. Unix revenues were $4.0 billion for the quarter, representing 30.6% of quarterly server spending. Linux servers posted their second consecutive quarter of growth, with year-over-year revenue growth of 8.4% for a total of $1.8 billion in the quarter. Linux-based servers now represent 13.7% of all server revenue.

IBM’s System z servers running the z/OS operating system returned to positive revenue growth in 1Q08, with 10.4% year-over-year growth to $1.1 billion. IBM z/OS servers accounted for 8.4% of all server revenue in 1Q08, the highest first quarter revenue for IBM’s System z systems in 3 years.

The market for non-x86 servers, including servers based on RISC, EPIC, and CISC processors, grew 2.5% year over year to $6 billion in 1Q08. IBM maintained its leadership position, posting 41.9% share in this segment, followed by Hewlett Packard (22.7%), and Sun Microsystems (19.5%) respectively based on factory revenue.

These are among the research findings from IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker.