Factory revenue in the worldwide server market grew 6.3pc year over year to reach US$13.1bn (€9.636bn) in the second quarter of 2007, reversing a trend of slowing unit shipments growth over the past three years.
IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker found that Q2 of 2007 saw the highest Q2 server revenue since the market peaked in 2000. It was the fifth consecutive quarter of positive revenue growth in the sector.
Server shipments grew 6.1pc year over year in the quarter, driven by an expansion of new distributed computing workload deployments across the market, said IDC.
“The server market not only continues to experience solid growth but revenue growth has accelerated over the past seven quarters. Although x86-based systems are once again the primary driver for overall market growth, continued growth in other market segments demonstrates that a single standardised infrastructure is not capable of meeting the full range of needs in today’s modern enterprise,” said Matt Eastwood, group vice-president of Enterprise Platforms at IDC.
“Enterprise customers of all types continue to focus on driving business growth. This growth drives new computing demands, which increasingly require both scale-up consolidated systems and scale-out distributed configurations to meet very different workload needs in today’s enterprise.”
IBM held onto the top spot in the worldwide server systems market with 31pc market share in factory revenue for Q2 2007, growing factory revenue by 6.4pc year over year.
HP had the second highest market share with 28.2pc of the market for the quarter, growing revenue 8pc year over year.
Linux servers posted the fifth consecutive quarter of accelerating revenue growth, with year-over-year revenue growth of 19pc, amounting to US$1.8bn for the quarter. Linux servers now represent 13.6pc of all server revenue, up from 12.1pc a year ago.
Microsoft Windows server revenue was US$5bn for the quarter, an 18.7pc increase on Q2 2006. Microsoft comprised 38.2pc of server market share in the quarter.
By Niall Byrne
