BANGALORE, INDIA: During the first quarter of 2010, a total of 371,060 servers were shipped to the Asia Pacific region, a 27.3 percent increase from the same quarter in 2009, according to Gartner Inc.

Vendor revenue was up 8.8 percent over the same period, generating $1.76 billion.

For two consecutive quarters, the server market in Asia Pacific has recorded the fastest growth compared to other regions worldwide. The economic recovery in this region continued during the first quarter and firmed up business confidence across different segments, including small and medium businesses (SMBs).

Server revenue recorded year-on-year growth across Gartner’s five sub-regions in Asia Pacific, with Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) and ASEAN leading the pack with increases of 36.4 and 17.6 percents respectively during the quarter.

In Greater China and India, despite strong consumption of x86 servers, revenue growth was somewhat flat at 4.3 and 4.2 percent respectively.

This was primarily due to the lack of contribution from higher end servers in non-x86 platforms (mainframe and RISC/IA-64) in this quarter. The Korean server market finally saw the return of positive growth, with market revenue up 7.8 percent from the same period in 2009, thanks to continuous improvement in market confidence that encouraged IT spending.

“Server consolidation and virtualization still played important roles as growth engines in mature markets like Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Australia, driving faster adoption of new processors on richer configured servers,” said Erica Gadjuli, principal analyst, Gartner. “Demand came generally from a mix of financial and public sectors in those markets.”

x86 servers remained as predominant platform that fostered market growth in this quarter. The product mix in this segment continued to move towards higher end platforms which resulted in faster revenue growth of 37.9 percent while shipment was up 30 percent.

The four socket x86 servers noted an increase in units share to 6.2 percent from 5.6 percent in previous quarter in addition to two-way servers that remained on higher demand and accounted for 73.5 percent of total server shipment currently. 

Blade servers (including x86 blades and RISC/IA-64 blades) growth consistently to be the fastest compared to other server form factors, rack and tower, with a 47.9 percent year-over-year shipment growth in 1Q10.

All major vendors benefit from this trend, led by HP and IBM with shipment shares of 47.9 and 28.8 percents, respectively, meanwhile Dell managed to almost double its blade shipment over the year.

Table 1: Asia/Pacific: Server Vendor Revenue Estimates, 1Q 2010 (U.S. Dollars)

Source: Gartner (May 2010)

As shown in Tables 1 and 2, IBM led the server market in revenue with 39.1 percent and HP was the leader in server shipment, accounted for 31.9 percent of total market.

HP and Dell gained advantage from the continuous strong demand of x86 systems and both vendors reported another double-digit increased on their shipment and revenue in this quarter. Amongst the top five vendors in revenue terms, Oracle was the only server vendors that experienced sharp decline currently.

Table 2: Asia/Pacific: Server Vendor Revenue Estimates, 1Q 2010 (Units)

Source: Gartner (May 2010)