IBM toppled HP for server market share in 3Q11 & other trends
Posted by Todd Bone on Wed, Nov 30, 2011 @ 02:08 PM
It’s always interesting to track worldwide server shipments and revenue. According to Gartner, shipments grew 7.2% year-over-year and revenue from server shipments grew 5.2%.
Some interesting trends to note:
By region:
- All regions of the world grew accept Western Europe which was down 4.8% in revenue
- Asia/Pacific grew the most in shipments with 23.9% increase
- Eastern Europe had the highest vendor revenue growth with 27.4%
By processor type:
- X86 Servers grew 7.6% in units and 9.3 percent in revenue
- RISC/Itanium UNIX server shipments declined 6.8%, but revenue increased 3.5%
- Mainframes slowed at a decline of 6.9%
By vendor:
- HP declined 3.6% - mostly due to drops in HP’s ProLiant brand
- Oracle/Sun declined less than 1%
- All other manufacturers grew
- Most of IBM’s growth came from its Power Systems line and System X line in the form of competitive displacements as HP and Oracle continue their dispute over support in HP’s Itanium-based servers
By system type:
- Blade servers grew 3.3% in shipment and 7.6% in revenue
- Rack-optimized servers climbed 8.2% in shipments and 6.3% in revenue
So the trends are showing that customers do not like it when manufacturers are shaky in their strategy or product timelines nor do they care much for anti-competitive practices.
The growth of Blade and Rack-optimized servers indicates a continuing demand for space saving solutions and easy administration.
