Worldwide server revenues fall 5pc in Q3

2 Dec 2008

Although shipments of servers worldwide increased 4.4pc, revenues were down 5.4pc year-on-year in the third quarter to US$12.7bn, according to Gartner.

During the third quarter, worldwide servers shipments reached 2.3 million units.

“Server shipments grew in the third quarter, but the spectre of constrained economies and tightened credit was felt in the revenue area,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice-president at Gartner.

“What we’ve seen is larger system purchases in the Unix area put in check. At the same time, x86 servers were able to maintain some shipment momentum, but lower overall average x86 server selling prices resulted in a drop in revenue in the quarter for this server type as well.

“Evidence of a challenged RISC-Itanium Unix server area appeared in a fall of 16.1pc in shipments and 10.8pc in revenue,” Hewitt added.

The top five vendors all experienced a decline in revenue in the third quarter of 2008. IBM held the revenue lead in the worldwide server market for the quarter. This was fuelled by sales of both the System P and System Z brands. IBM’s overall revenue share lead over second-place Hewlett-Packard (HP) was 0.5pc for the quarter.

In server shipments, HP grew 11.4pc compared to the third quarter of 2007, and retained its worldwide server shipment lead.

The share gap between it and second-place Dell increased 2.1pc for the quarter.

HP finished the quarter with its shipment market share reaching 31.2pc for the period. HP’s growth came from its ProLiant brands. HP pushed its blade server shipment share upward 3.9pc to reach a total of 46.4pc for the quarter.

Dell and Sun both posted shipment growth for the quarter at 3.3pc and 2.9pc, respectively. IBM’s server shipments fell 3.5pc, and Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens’ server shipments dropped 3.8pc for the quarter.

By John Kennedy

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com