Server market sees Q2 drop
Strong refresh cycle in previous years blamed for third quarter of consecutive revenue decline, according to IDC
The global server market shrank in the second quarter of the year, according to the latest figures from IDC.
Revenue for the quarter decreased 4.8 per cent to $12.6bn (£8bn), marking the third quarter of year-over-year revenue decline.
Europe also saw weaker demand than the US and Asia-Pacific, IDC revealed. The analyst attributed this to a continued softening in demand following a strong refresh cycle in 2010 and 2011.
HP and IBM topped the leader board in joint first place, with HP gaining the edge over IBM with 29.6 per cent of the market, compared with IBM’s 29.2 per cent. Dell grabbed third place, with Oracle in fourth and Fujitsu fifth.
On a year-over-year basis, volume systems experienced a 2.5 per cent revenue decline. At the same time, demand for mid-range and high-end systems experienced year-over-year revenue declines of 11.2 per cent and 7.6 per cent respectively in Q2 2012.
Matt Eastwood, group vice president and general manager of enterprise platforms at IDC, said: “Regionally, server demand in western Europe and Japan was particularly soft while server revenue in the US and Asia-Pacific managed to grow modestly. It is important to note that IDC believes that server demand will begin to improve in the second half of 2012 following a number of critical product refreshes which continue to be announced."
Breaking the figures down, Linux server demand continued to be positively affected by high-performance computing and cloud deployments, increasing at 1.7 per cent year on year and representing 22.1 per cent of all server revenue.
Microsoft Windows server demand was up 0.3 per cent year on year, representing 47.9 per cent of overall factory revenue.
Unix servers were hit in the quarter, experiencing a revenue decline of 20.3 per cent year on year, and revenue on non-x86 servers including RISC, EPIC and CISC processor-based servers fell 19.4 per cent in Q2 2012.
Kuba Stolarski, research manager of enterprise servers at IDC, said: “The Unix server market is in between generation refresh cycles, and continues to be hampered by workload consolidation and migration to other platforms. IDC expects the Unix market to stabilise over the next few years and remain a smaller, specialised segment of the overall server market, catering primarily to customers who are looking for high levels of availability and stability in a scale-up architecture."