Dell wins out as global server market slides
Dell wins out as global server market slides
Dell was the only one of the top five server makers to increases its sales and market share in the first quarter of 2013, when the number of servers sold worldwide fell by 0.7 percent.
Overall global server revenues were down 0.5 percent over the first quarter of the year, according to figures released on Tuesday by IT analyst Gartner.
“The first quarter of 2013 was certainly not a strong period for the server market on a global level,” Gartner research vice-president Jeffrey Hewitt said on Tuesday.
The top five server vendors all experienced revenue declines in the first quarter of the year — except for Dell, which grew 14.4 percent.
Oracle saw server revenues of $538.5m in the first quarter of 2013, compared to $739.8m in the first quarter of 2012.
IBM remains the market leader with 25.5 percent of the server market share, despite a 2.5 percent decline in server revenues on the same time last year. IBM generated more than $3bn of revenue from servers in the first quarter of 2013, with 29.3 percent of its server revenue coming from the System X sub-brand.
Blade servers fell 5.9 percent in shipments and five percent in revenues over the first quarter, while rack-optimised servers fell 5.2 percent in shipments and two percent in revenue over the same period.
“x86 server shipment growth was flat in the quarter, while revenue increased 1.8 percent,” Hewitt said. “RISC/Itanium Unix servers declined globally for the period, down 38.8 percent in shipments and down 35.8 percent in vendor revenue compared to the same quarter last year. The ‘other’ CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, exhibited an increase of 3.6 percent in worldwide revenue.”
This time last year, ZDNet reported that server shipments were up but server revenues were down.
Gartner claims that the market environment remains difficult for all vendors, but particularly those that are the most exposed to the enterprise customer segment.
“The reality for server vendors is that spending levels are very low and there is severe weakness in the high-end segment. There are still areas of opportunity, but vendors need to be agile and focused on addressing them. The outlook for 2013 remains challenging,” O’Connell said.