Sun Takes Lead in Aus Server Market

By Greg McNevin

September 4, 2007: According to new figures from IDC, Sun has taken the lead in the Aussie server market, snatching a 30.9 percent share in terms of revenue thanks to consolidation, virtualisation and green technology trends.

Unearthed by IDC’s Asia/Pacific Quarterly Enterprise Server Tracker in Q2 2007, the figures show Sun’s UltraSPARC T1 sales surging 249 percent year-on-year. This combined with a 54.3 percent share of revenue from midrange enterprise server sales and a 67.6 percent share of Unix server sales leaves Sun as Australia’s top dog for servers in terms of revenue

IDC also found that the firm has managed to snare a 62.9 percent share of midrange enterprise server shipments and a 70.7 percent share of UNIX servers shipped, and that it was the fastest growing vendor in the Windows servers segment in ANZ.

“Our achievement in taking on the number one server position in Australia is indicative of strong interest in enterprise consolidation and virtualisation platforms as well as the growth of Solaris. We’ve also had huge success in adoption of our energy efficient technologies, said Gary Kelly, head of Sun’s systems practice for Australia and New Zealand.

“Driven by power, cooling and space considerations, this trend has resulted in a resurgence of the high-end of the market where Sun is particularly strong,” he added.

Kelly claims that there is a growing awareness of the need for companies to reduce their carbon emissions, move to more environmentally sustainable business practices and green the data centre. He says that due to this, Sun has seen significant growth in its UltraSPARC T1- based systems which consume less energy than a household light bulb.

Kelly also says that Sun has witnessed increased adoption of its open source enterprise OS Solaris 10, with global downloads now eclipsing 7 million.

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