Demand for servers continues to grow

Latest IDC quarterly tracker report shows that demand has increased for the ninth consecutive quarter

Demand for servers has grown for the ninth consecutive quarter, according to market watcher IDC’s latest Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker.

The analyst has claimed that factory revenue in the worldwide server market grew by 5.6 per cent to $12.2bn in the second quarter of 2005. Volume server revenue grew by 11.1 per cent, but the high-end enterprise server market declined three per cent in its third consecutive quarter of reduced spending.

IBM led the pack with 31.9 per cent market share, followed by Hewlett-Packard with 28.5 per cent. Other vendors in the top five were Sun, Dell and Fujitsu Siemens, which had 11.3 per cent, 10.5 per cent and 2.5 per cent market share respectively.

Matt Eastwood, program vice-president of worldwide server research at IDC, said: “IT acquisition patterns are changing and we are seeing the product mix of server investments change. Strength in mid-range servers and Unix high-end servers shows that customers are balancing their scale-out volume server deployments with scale-up servers to handle workloads.”

However, Alex Kaye, managing director at VAR AK IT (UK) Solutions, said demand had been sluggish for the first half of the year.

“We are seeing late surges of growth in the year. Business has really only just started booming for us, the first half of the year has been really flat and quieter than usual, but it is too early to tell how the rest of the year is going to pan out,” he said.

Separately, a joint survey by distributor Sunbelt System Software and the Yankee Group claimed that 48 per cent of firms, regardless of size, hold onto their server hardware for between four and six years. The research questioned 1,700 IT managers and executives worldwide.