Worldwide server shipments for the third quarter of 2009 dropped
17.1 percent over the same quarter last year, while worldwide
server revenue for the same period declined 15.5 percent according
to Gartner. Worldwide server revenues totaled $10.7 billion for the
quarter, as worldwide servers shipments reached 1.2 million
units.
"It is important to put the yearly declines into
perspective,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at
Gartner. “Looking at the third quarter results from the
sequential perspective, they showed an increase of 13.8 percent in
shipments and 10.2 percent in revenues when compared to the second
quarter of this year. That suggests that the market as a whole is
showing signs of stabilization as we move toward the end of
2009.”
IBM held the revenue lead in the worldwide server market for the
quarter (see Table 1). IBM’s overall revenue share lead over
second-place HP was 1.5 percent for the quarter. Four of the top 5
vendors posted double-digit declines in revenue year over year.
However, all of the top tier vendors experienced sequential revenue
growth, except for Sun Microsystems.
In server shipments, Hewlett-Packard retained its worldwide server
shipment lead, as its market share reached 32.1 percent in the
third quarter of 2009. Dell maintained the No. 2 ranking as its
share totaled 22.8 percent (see Table 2). HP’s shipment
performance was driven primarily by its ProLiant brands.
While the global server providers all posted year-on-year shipment
declines for the quarter, all of the vendors experienced sequential
shipment increases for the period.
Overall, the Indian server market totaled at around US$118Mn during
this quarter registering a year-on-year decline of 28.3 percent.
This market decline could be partly contributed to the sluggish
economic situation coupled with seasonality observed around this
quarter. Gartner expects that the OND quarter should be much better
primarily fuelled by a lot of pent up demand coupled with year end
buying. Overall, Hewlett Packard emerged as the market leader
followed by IBM and Sun Microsystems. HP and IBM were the worst
affected vendors due to the limited market server demand during
this quarter in India.
x86 servers accounted for around 59 percent of the market revenue
leading to a revenue increase of 4.4 percent, as compared to last
quarter. This further suggests that India CIO’s have started
selective purchase of servers, which can be considered as early
signal of economic recovery. India companies have undertaken a lot
server refresh and consolidation projects. Virtualization has been
a key driver for such deployments in large as well as mid-market
territory. On the other side, non x86 segment of the server
witnessed a sequential decline of 35.9 percent this quarter.
Some of the large projects seem to be deferred for the next
quarter.