Server sales soar in Q2

After a year to forget in 2009, the market is back in rude health, according to IDC

A brighter day: Global server revenues grew at their fastest rate for seven years in Q2

The server market continued its impressive march towards recovery in 2010's second quarter, with revenue growing at its fastest rate for seven years.

The Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker from analyst IDC reveals that global factory revenue in Q2 was up 11 per cent annually to $10.9bn (£7.1m). After a torrid 2009, the market began recovering in Q1. The Q2 figures represent the fastest quarter of sales growth since 2003. Unit shipments also rose 23.8 per cent year on year during Q2.

Low-end and mid-range servers provided all the growth in Q2, with sales growing 31.7 and 15.6 per cent respectively. The market for higher-end enterprise wares continued to be much tougher, and sales dropped more than a quarter on last year. Sales of top-of-the-range servers have now declined for seven successive quarters.

Over the last year, HP has ousted IBM as the market's leading vendor and stretched its lead further in Q2. HP grew revenues 36 per cent annually to $3.5bn and grabbed a 32.5 per cent slice of the market. Big Blue posted a 3.2 per cent revenue decline, as its market share slipped to 29.8 per cent.

Dell was the quarter's big winner, with sales growing 36.5 per cent on last year to $1.7bn. The Texan manufacturer grabbed 15.3 per cent of the market – a rise of almost three points on Q2 2009.

Oracle, in fourth, held 8.6 per cent of the market – down 1.6 points on last year. Sales fell six per cent annually to $938m. Fujitsu rounded out the top five after taking a 3.4 per cent piece of the market. The Japanese firm's server sales in Q2 rose 7.9 per cent annually to $368m.

Matt Eastwood, group vice of enterprise platforms at IDC, said: "The server market is at a crossroads; this is the fourth consecutive quarter of improving server market demand and the fastest quarterly server revenue growth IDC has reported in more than five years.

"We continue to see widespread infrastructure refresh occurring across all geographies. While much of this refresh is occurring first in x86-based servers, IDC expects the recovery to extend to Unix and mainframe platforms in the second half of 2010.

"That said, it is clear that a wave of migration is also occurring as customers broaden their deployment of x86-based servers to a wider range of workloads."