Advertisment

IBM eclipses Sun in server space

author-image
CIOL Bureau
Updated On
New Update

BANGALORE: IBM emerged as the winner in the server race in this quarter, says IDC. IBM has a 30.4 percent share of the $10.6 billion worldwide server market. Despite its merger with Compaq, HP had to make do with second spot. HP recorded a 0.4 percent rise in sale to $2.9 billion. The IDC report ranks Sun Microsystems has No.3 and Dell as no.4 in overall server sales.

Advertisment

Sun tops the Unix server market with 33 percent of the $4.33 billion space. But Sun's sales dropped by 19.1 per cent while IBM's enjoyed a growth of 20.4 percent. HP, which stands no.2 in the Unix server segment, saw its sales dropping 3.6 percent.

IBM showed strong growth in its Linux business, growing more than 36% year over year, with respect to revenue – more than tripling the market growth of 11%. IBM’s strong performance was due largely in part to strong marketing efforts of their xSeries and Linux server business lines and high demand for their Linux cluster systems in the United States.

Sun Microsystems maintained its number-one position in the Unix server market with 39% market share, followed by Hewlett-Packard at 31% and IBM at 20%. “Despite the market decline rate of 20% year to year in the Unix server market, the top 3 vendors continue to make strong strides in consolidating their shares of the total available market,” said Hoang Nguyen, manager of IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker program. “Their combined revenues represent nearly 90% of the overall Unix market, making it very difficult for smaller vendors to compete in this space.”

The Unix server space suffered a setback. Intel-based servers are now a larger market than Unix servers, says the IDC report. The server market based on Intel processors grew 10.7 percent to $4.46 billion, whereas the Unix server market dropped 5.2 percent to $4.33 billion.

tech-news