Sun rises to knock Dell off server perch

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 23 August 2006 13:11

IT Industry - Market

After four years of continual bad news, the sun has finally broken through the clouds for Sun Microsystems as it totally outshone its rivals in the global server market during the second quarter of 2006, according to statistics from research group IDC.

According to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, Sun was the only server vendor among the top four to post both a revenue and market share increase both of which came at the expense of its three rivals, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell.

The IDC stats show that Sun posted an impressive year on year 15.5% server revenue increase for the quarter, which translated into a global market share increase of 1.7% to 12.9%.

The Sun result was in stark contrast to its three competitors. Market leader IBM suffered a revenue decline of 2.2% and market share loss of 0.9% to 31%. HP revenue declined 1.7% and lost 0.7% market share to 27.8%. Dell's revenue dropped by 1.3% and its market share went down 0.2% to 10.3%.

Dell, which has been having a horror run of news recently, now finds in the number four spot well behind Sun, after being number three in the previous quarter

According to IDC research director enterprise server research, Steve Josselyn, the move of Sun into the commodity AMD processor space has contributed to the company's growth, even though its traditional proprietary SPARC platform still provides the lion's share of the revenue.

"Sun continued its strong server revenue performance in consecutive quarters and regained the number 3 overall market share position," said Josselyn. "The clear majority of Sun's server revenue is generated from UltraSPARC-based systems, but the growth in the company's Opteron-based products are having a positive impact."