Server Sales Slowing
Server Sales Slowing
December 3, 2007: According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, demand for x86, Unix and Blade Servers has helped boost an otherwise slow market to achieve modest growth for Q3.
The tracker found that factory revenue for the worldwide server market grew 0.5 percent year over year to US$13.1 billion in Q3, however, despite this being the sixth consecutive quarter of positive revenue growth (and the highest Q3 server revenue since 2000), it was the slowest growth rate since the first quarter of 2006.
IDC found that server unit shipments grew by 6.3 percent year over year, a slight decrease from the 7.8 percent achieved in the same period last year, while in the midrange and despite growth in Windows servers, Linux servers, and Unix servers, revenue for midrange enterprise servers declined 2.2 percent year over year - the second consecutive quarterly decrease in that segment.
Revenue for high-end enterprise servers also declined 14.5 percent year over year, the largest decline in spending growth in more than five years.
Despite these declines, there was some good news in volume systems revenue growth, which improved to 8.1 percent year over year - the second highest growth rate for this important segment over the past eight quarters.
“Although demand for x86, Blades, and Unix systems remained strong, other parts of the market cooled off in the third quarter,” said Matt Eastwood, group vice president of Enterprise Platforms at IDC.
“Concerns about the economy, particularly in the U.S., are causing customers to re-think their infrastructure needs at the same time that new levels of compute and power densities are expanding power and cooling challenges and driving different IT infrastructure acquisition patterns in the market.”
“IDC believes that we are in the early stages of a market-wide transition, which will require significant IT investment in a more flexible IT fabric; however, concerns among buyers about an economic slowdown could slow investment in new systems somewhat,” added Eastwood.
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