As the worldwide recession took hold late last year and into the first quarter of 2009, shipments and revenues for the global server market plummeted by 24 percent each, according to Gartner. IBM remained the top revenue generator, and HP sold the most units in a quarter plagued by economic deterioration and businesses drastically cutting back their IT budgets. Gartner analysts said 2009 will be a difficult year for server makers, though the second half should show a slight improvement.The worldwide server industry, battered by the global recession, experienced
historic declines in the first quarter, according to research firm Gartner.
Echoing what counterpart
IDC found in its first-quarter report May 28, Gartner June 1 reported that
server revenue declined 24 percent worldwide in the first quarter from the same
period in 2008, and shipments dropped 24.2 percent.
Gartner analyst Jeffrey Hewitt said the results in the first quarter was an
extension of what happened in the fourth quarter last year, and that 2009 was
going to be a weak year for the market, with growth not returning until 2010.
While this [first-quarter drop] was not unexpected, the severity of the
decline was greater than predicted on a worldwide level, Hewitt said in a
statement.
All segments of the market were hit. Shipments for x86-based systems fell
23.9 percent, while revenues dropped 27.1 percent, Gartner found. For Unix
servers, those numbers were a 31.3 percent decline in shipments and 20.4
percent drop in revenue.
In a Gartner video, analyst Errol Rasit said it was the x86 market that has
gotten hurt the most by the economic downturn. In the first quarter, we saw
volumes fall off the cliff the quickest and the most severe, Rasit said.
However, the second half of the year could be better, and when the recovery
does take hold, he said the x86 market will see the most rapid improvement over
the Unix and mainframe spaces, where prices are higher and buying cycles
longer.
IBM generated the most server revenue,
with $3.1 billion in revenue and a market share of 30.7 percent. While market
share was up for IBM, revenue dropped 20.4
percent.
The other top five server makersHewlett-Packard, Dell, Sun Microsystems and
Fujitsusaw similar revenue declines.
HP was tops in server shipments, selling 530,849 units for a 30.8 percent
share. But HP, like the other four top server makers, saw a huge dip in
shipments from the same period in 2008.
Rasit, the Gartner analyst, said that businesses that had already cut back
on its purchases are now cutting back the money for server maintenance, and IT
administrators are turning to such tools as x86 virtualization technology to
consolidate their systems and extend the life of their servers.