IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker has revealed that worldwide server factory revenue grew 3.6 per cent to $54.4 billion on the back of 6.7 per cent volume growth to 8 million units.
The last time the market was worth that much was at the height of the tech investment frenzy that was the dotcom bubble, when factory revenue peaked at $61.6 billion.
The major driver for this growth appears to be the ‘volume systems’ segment, which saw 8.2 per cent year-on-year revenue growth in 2007. Both the SMB and corporate markets seem to have contributed to this, while ‘midrange enterprise server’ revenue declined by half a per cent and ‘high-end enterprise server’ revenue dropped 5.7 per cent.
Matthew Eastwood, group vice president of IDC's Enterprise Platforms Group, attributes the continued strength of demand to “a continued shift towards modularization as customers expand and refresh their IT infrastructures while embracing blade computing as well as scale-out and scale-up server technologies." So there you go.
"As the market continues to look for signs of an economic slowdown, spending for new IT projects could be impacted,” he added. “However, IDC believes that recent gains in both system performance and manageability will continue to drive consolidation, virtualization and other infrastructure refresh projects where changing datacenter economics help CIOs build defensible business cases necessary for continued strategic IT investment."
Among the vendors, IBM stayed at numero uno with over a third of the market. HP had over a quarter, while Dell and Sun both had around a tenth. They seem to be going in opposite directions, however, with Dell increasing its revenue by 6.8 per cent year-on-year in Q4 ’07, while Sun’s declined by 2.4 per cent.
On the software side, Microsoft and Unix have around a third of the market each, with Microsoft starting to pull away, while Linux had 12.7 per cent of the market – a full per cent extra market share increase on Q4 ’06.
