| This week researcher IDC came out with its survey of worldwide server sales for the first quarter of 2009, and not surprisingly, the picture was ugly. Worldwide server revenues sank 25% in the first quarter of 2009, the biggest quarterly drop IDC has seen in 12 years of tracking the market.
The summary of the report can be viewed here. But the summary doesn’t tell you some of the details behind the numbers – including who appears to be winning and losing in this tough market.
Let’s start with the winners. According to IDC, IBM’s System z servers running the z/OS operating system outperformed the market for the fifth consecutive quarter, with an 18.9% year-over-year revenue decline to $889 million. (Yes, that’s a revenue decline of 18.9%, but keep in mind the overall market fell by 25%.) System z/OS servers accounted for 9% of all server revenue in the first quarter, the highest revenue share for System z in five years.
Non-x86 servers, including those based on RISC, EPIC, and CISC processors, declined 19.4% year-over-year to $4.8 billion. IDC says this is the fifth consecutive quarter that non-x86 servers have out performed the x86 servers. IBM maintained its leadership position in that market, with a 42.8% share, followed by HP at 21.8% and Sun Microsystems at 18.2%.
Unix servers meanwhile experienced a 17.5% year-over-year decline. IBM once again held the leader post with 31% market share, followed by Sun and HP tied with 27.7% market share.
Those three market segments held up better than the overall market, so which ones took a beating?
According to IDC, Microsoft Windows server revenue fell the hardest – dropping 28.9% in the first quarter of 2009, on a year-over-year basis. On a revenue basis, Windows server sales were about $3.7 billion. Still, Windows server revenue comprised 37.3% of all server revenue in the quarter.
Also taking its lumps was the Linux server market. IDC says Linux revenues fell 24.8% year-over-year to $1.4 billion. That was the lowest quarterly revenue figure for Linux servers in five years.
Here’s one other insight to pull out of the IDC figures: While Unix server revenue declined in the quarter, Unix servers represented a greater percent of total IT spend in the first quarter of 2009 than the same period in 2008 (33.1% of worldwide server spend versus 30.2%).
“IDC believes that lengthening server lifecycles in the datacenter, especially for scalable midrange and high-end servers, affected Unix server sales in terms of declining revenue and unit shipments in the first quarter,” said Jean Bozman, research vice president for IDC’s enterprise platform group.
However, Bozman says their strong contribution as a percent of first quarter worldwide server spend reflects the presence of midrange and high-end systems carrying higher average sales prices. As well, there appeared to be a split in the market between low-cost and high-end systems based on workloads, such as large corporate databases, transaction processing, and business intelligence.
Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register. |
