The sluggish US economy proved to be a killjoy for the worldwide server market during the first quarter. According to IDC, worldwide server factory revenues declined 4 per cent from $13.8 billion in the first quarter of 2000 to $13.3 billion in the first three months of this year. In the US market, the descent was much more precipitous as revenues plummeted 16 per cent from $5.2 billion in the first quarter of 2000 to $4.4 billion in first quarter 2001. "Though the decline in the US market was quite severe, strong growth in other parts of the world such as Western Europe and Asia/Pacific kept worldwide damage in check," said Vernon Turner, IDC's vice president of Global Enterprise Server Solutions. Despite declining revenues in the overall server market, the rack-optimised segment turned in another stellar performance. Shipments jumped almost 138 per cent, igniting revenue growth of 87 per cent. In comparison, revenues in the non-rack-optimised server market fell 9 per cent.
"In this economy, companies are hypersensitive about cost-savings, and rack-optimised servers are all about savings," Turner said. "They help organisations save space and reduce their energy consumption."
In terms of vendor performance, IBM and Dell were the only top-five players to increase their revenues in the worldwide market, with 13 per cent and 21 per cent jumps, respectively. IDC rates the top five vendors in the worldwide market according to revenue share as follows: IBM 25 per cent, Hewlett-Packard 16 per cent, Sun Microsystems 15.4 per cent, Compaq 14.7 per cent, Dell 7 per cent.
In the US market, Dell was the only top-five vendor to increase its revenues with 12 per cent growth.
According to IDC, the top five US vendors by revenue share are as follows: IBM 22 per cent, Sun Microsystems 18 per cent, Hewlett-Packard 16.3 per cent, Compaq 15.9 per cent, Dell 12 per cent.
IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker is a quantitative tool for analysing the global server market on a quarterly basis.
The Tracker includes quarterly shipments (both ISS and upgrades) and revenues (both customer and factory), segmented by vendor, family, model, region, operating system, price band, CPU type, and architecture.
