As the financial crisis continues and as the United States officially enters a recession, top server vendors Hewlett-Packard and IBM watched their revenue drop in the third quarter of 2008. In addition to HP and IBM, Dell and Sun Microsystems watched their server revenue fall in the third quarter. In terms of shipments, HP and Dell managed to increase their share.The ongoing financial crisis and concerns about the overall health of the
economy in the United States
had a big impact on the worldwide server market in the third quarter of 2008,
with revenues declining 5 percent from a year ago.
All five of the worlds major server vendorsHewlett-Packard,
IBM,
Dell, Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemenswatched their revenues from
server sales fall in the third quarter, according to a Dec. 1 report from
Gartner. Overall, worldwide server revenue stood at $12.7 billion in the third
quarter, compared with the $13.4 billion the market saw a year ago.
While revenues fell, server shipments increased more than 4 percent for a
total of about 2.3 million units. The Gartner report found that buyers put off
purchasing more expensive Unix systems, while the average selling prices of
commodity, x86 servers continued to drop.
Shipments of Unix, RISC and Itanium servers dropped 16 percent in the third
quarter, while revenue from these systems fell nearly 11 percent, according to
the Gartner survey.
The Gartner report came on the same day that the National Bureau of Economic Research, a
nonprofit research organization, declared that the United
States had officially entered a recession.
In the weeks leading up to the Dec. 1 announcement, several research firms,
including Gartner and IDC, cut their IT spending outlook for 2009. Many enterprises
are already looking to cut back on hardware purchases, especially PCs and
servers.
IBM continued to dominate the market in
terms of revenue, as the company recorded revenues of $3.9 billion in the third
quarter of 2008, thanks to sales of its Power Systems and System z mainframes.
However, Big Blues revenue fell 4 percent from a year ago, when the company
posted revenue of more than $4 billion, according to Gartner.
HPs server revenue fell nearly 4 percent to $3.8 billion, while Dell
watched its server revenue decline 5 percent to $1.5 billion. Sun took the
biggest hit, with revenue declining about 13 percent from $1.3 billion in the third
quarter of 2007 to $1.2 billion during the third quarter of this year.
Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemenss revenue fell about 7 percent to $616 million.
In terms of shipments, HP led all five of the major vendors, shipping more
than 724,000 system units in the third quarter. That was an increase of 11
percent compared with the third quarter of 2007. During the quarter, HP
increased its shipments of its x86-based ProLiant systems and increased its
overall blade server shipments by 3.9 percent.
Dell finished second to HP, shipping more than 500,000 servers during the
quarter, an increase of about 3 percent.
IBM watched its shipments drop 3.5
percent for a total of 308,524 units shipped during the third quarter of 2008.
Suns shipments increased about 3 percent for a total of 81,522 units, and
Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens shipments decreased 3.8 percent for a total of 73,578
units, according to Gartner.