Aiming high
The PC market may have stalled towards the end of last year, but the server market seems to have picked up the slack.
The latest global server market figures from market researcher IDC reveal year-on-year revenue growth of over 15 percent in Q4 2010, which was the highest quarterly growth for three years.
Furthermore it was clearly higher-margin stuff being sold, as shipments only increased by six percent. This ran contrary to the full-year trend, which saw revenue increase by 11.4 percent and volume jump by 15.3 percent.
The reason for this Q4 anomaly was a big jump in high-end server sales, which was especially good news for IBM. This trend also emphasised what a heterogeneous environment the server market is, with plenty of activity outside the Wintel paradigm.
"Non-x86 platforms contributed significantly to the server market recovery in the fourth quarter and it remains clear that a variety of heterogeneous server platforms remain an integral part of a comprehensive enterprise IT strategy today," said Matt Eastwood of IDC.
"At the same time, datacenters are being optimized to support virtualization, automation, convergence, workload-optimized systems, and cloud strategies in both large and small organizations around the globe. For end-users, there are more IT choices available than ever, many of which are designed to deliver impressive price-performance gains to the datacenter and virtually all of these IT infrastructure solutions leverage server platforms at their core."
Despite the claims made by HP in a press release, IBM kept its number one spot for the full year, but only just. You can see the breakdowns by vendor for Q4 and for the full year, respectively, below.
Top 5 Corporate Family, Worldwide Server Systems Factory Revenue, Fourth Quarter of 2010 (Revenues are in Millions)
|
Vendor |
4Q10 Revenue |
Market Share |
4Q09 Revenue |
Market Share |
Q410/Q409 Revenue Growth |
|
IBM |
$5,592 |
37.4% |
$4,587 |
35.4% |
21.9% |
|
HP |
$4,470 |
29.9% |
$3,950 |
30.4% |
13.2% |
|
Dell |
$1,887 |
12.6% |
$1,489 |
11.5% |
26.8% |
|
Sun |
$883 |
5.9% |
$1,032 |
8.0% |
-14.4% |
|
Fujitsu |
$541 |
3.6% |
$597 |
4.6% |
-9.4% |
|
Others |
$1,586 |
10.6% |
$1,321 |
10.2% |
20.1% |
|
All Vendors |
$14,960 |
100% |
$12,975 |
100% |
15.3% |
IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, February 2011
Top 5 Corporate Family, Worldwide Server Systems Factory Revenue, Full Year 2010 (Revenues are in Millions)
|
Vendor |
2010 Revenue |
Market Share |
2009 Revenue |
Market Share |
2010/2009 Revenue Growth |
|
IBM |
$15,356 |
31.9% |
$14,153 |
32.7% |
8.5% |
|
HP |
$15,324 |
31.8% |
$12,888 |
29.8% |
18.9% |
|
Dell |
$7,014 |
14.6% |
$5,227 |
12.1% |
34.2% |
|
Sun |
$3,279 |
6.8% |
$3,812 |
8.8% |
-14.0% |
|
Fujitsu |
$2,194 |
4.6% |
$2,194 |
5.1% |
0.0% |
|
Others |
$4,970 |
10.3% |
$4,944 |
11.4% |
0.5% |
|
All Vendors |
$48,137 |
100% |
$43,218 |
100% |
11.4% |
IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, February 2011
