Businesses are investing in backend, not client says Gartner

Anthony Caruana
Tuesday, 30 November 2010 09:04

Your IT - Mobility

Gartner says that worldwide server shipments in the third quarter of 2010 grew 14.2 percent year over year, while revenue moved upward 15.3 percent year over year. This is in stark contrast to their PC shipment forecast.

According to Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner "The third quarter produced some solid year-over-year growth globally in both shipments and vendor revenue'. Only shipments in the Middle East and Africa fell 2.9 percent in vendor revenue despite shipments increasing by 4.2 percent for the quarter.

x86-based servers were the main  market driver, growing 14.9 percent in units and 29.5 percent in revenue for Q3 2010. The good news for resellers is that unlike the softening PC market, average selling prices are increasing as buyers look for more robust server configurations to accommodate virtualization. It was the higher average selling prices that pushed revenue higher than shipments. It seems that while client devices are getting cheaper, infrastructure is being bolstered.

The 'Other' CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, also added to the revenue increase for the quarter with growth of 9.9 percent. RISC/Itanium Unix servers remained in a slump with drops of 10.1 percent in shipments and 9.5 percent in vendor revenue compared with the same quarter last year according to Gartner's research.

Regionally, Gartner found the following:

• Latin America grew the most significantly in shipments with a 28.3 percent increase.
• Eastern Europe posted the highest vendor revenue growth at 33.3 percent for the period.
• The U.S. climbed 17 percent in shipments and 16.3 percent in vendor revenue with sales being driven by demand from large-scale data center purchases.
• Western Europe grew 8.8 percent in shipments and 5.7 percent in vendor revenue.

Gartner doesn;t have statistics for Australia at this time.

The vendor space sees HP leading the global server market with over $3.9 billion in server vendor revenue for a total market share of 32.1% for Q3 2010 - up 1.9% year over year. IBM, Dell and Fujitsu also say solid increases but Oracle suffered a 2.6% drop in market share although revenues were slightly higher.

In terms of shipments, HP, IBM, Dell and Fujitsu all saw growth with NEC maintaining its place in the top five despite a 2% drop in shipments for the quarter compared to the same period last year.