Server market growth biggest for seven years

Server market growth

The past three months has seen the biggest growth in the server market since 2003, according to a new report.

Analyst firm IDC claimed revenue worldwide for servers had increased by 11 per cent when compared to the second quarter of 2009, which as well as being the second consecutive quarter of year-on-year growth, was the best quarterly performance by the market in seven years.

On top of $10.9 billion (7.05 billion) revenue, shipments also increased by 23.8 per cent year-on-year, which was the fastest shipment growth for more than five years.

"The server market is at a crossroads," said Matt Eastwood, group vice president of enterprise platforms at IDC.

He claimed there is a "wide-spread infrastructure refresh" happening throughout a number of industries at the moment, helping with this increase in shipments and revenues.

"While much of this refresh is occurring first in x86-based servers, IDC expects the recovery to extend to Unix and mainframe platforms in the second half of 2010," he added. "That said, it is clear that a wave of migration is also occurring as customers broaden their deployment of x86-based servers to a wider range of workloads."

HP topped the vendor list in the quarterly report, with a market share of 32.5 per cent and a 26 per cent revenue increase year-on-year, amounting to just over $3.5 billion.

IBM took second place with revenues of $3.2 billion a 3.2 per cent decrease from the second quarter of 2009 and Dell held onto third with revenues of $1.66 billion a growth of 36.5 per cent since last year.

Jennifer Scott

Jennifer Scott is a former freelance journalist and currently political reporter for Sky News. She has a varied writing history, having started her career at Dennis Publishing, working in various roles across its business technology titles, including ITPro. Jennifer has specialised in a number of areas over the years and has produced a wealth of content for ITPro, focusing largely on data storage, networking, cloud computing, and telecommunications.

Most recently Jennifer has turned her skills to the political sphere and broadcast journalism, where she has worked for the BBC as a political reporter, before moving to Sky News.