Aussies spent $US1 billion on servers

By Stephen Withers
Monday, 28 April 2008 11:47

Home IT

The Australian server market reached $US1.001 billion during 2007 according to analyst firm IDC.

Although volume only grew by two percent, that figure masks the huge increase in spending driven by strong growth in the high-end enterprise market.

That segment grew by an amazing 30.2 percent due in part to the interest in virtualisation.

"Virtualisation helped boost server revenue numbers in 2007 with richer configurations of servers being deployed to drive space, utilisation and energy efficiency," says Matthew Oostveen, research manager of Asia/Pacific enterprise servers and workstations research at IDC.

Spending growth in the midrange enterprise and volume segments also contributed to the overall 17 percent growth.
 
"Virtualisation was also one of the key underpinnings for the 40 percent increase in x86 blade server shipments in 2007," said Oostveen.

Differences in market segments resulted in IBM being the number one vendor in terms of revenue (followed by HP and Dell), but IDC's analysis by volume  puts HP at the top of the list followed by Dell.

Sun came in at number three for revenue, but was the only leading vendor to achieve year-on-year revenue growth, according to IDC.