Indian server market surges ahead in Q2 '07

NEW DELHI: The India server market grew by 30 per cent year-on-year to touch $169 million (Rs 698 crore) factory revenues during the second quarter of 2007, according to IDC's Asia/Pacific Quarterly Enterprise Server Tracker for Q2 2007.

This was the second consecutive quarter when unit shipments grew by approximately 12 per cent over the previous quarter. The unit shipments increase in the India Server market are mainly driven by expansion of new distributed computing workload deployments across key segments.

The high-end enterprise server space saw a 91 per cent year-on-year growth in Q2 with market traction coming in from the financial services, communications and media. The mid-range enterprise server segment however witnessed muted growth with 4 per cent year-on-year growth while the volume server segment recorded 32 per cent growth mainly from the financial services and manufacturing verticals.

Amit Dalal, analyst for Server Research, IDC India, said, "The India Server market is poised to show strong momentum in the coming quarters as well. While demand for Volume Servers will increase beyond the metros, the need for scale will continue to create demand for High-end and Mid-range servers as well."

The overall India server market shipments during 2Q 2007 aggregated to 35,615 units, with HP emerging as the leader both in terms of factory revenues as well as unit shipments during 2Q 2007, followed by IBM.

During the quarter, the Indian x86 server market performed well across the financial services, infrastructure services, distribution services and manufacturing sectors, clocking revenues of nearly $108 million (Rs 445 crore), which corresponded to 33,323 unit shipments. HP held on to its number one position in this segment both in unit shipments and factory revenue terms, followed by IBM and Dell.

The India non-x86/Unix Server market saw phenomenal growth across various verticals, mainly financial services, infrastructure services and distribution services, clocking nearly $ 55 million (Rs 227 crore) corresponding to 2,246 units during 2Q 2007. Sun Microsystems was the market leader in the non-x86/Unix server segment both in terms of unit shipments as well factory revenues, followed by IBM and HP.

The India Blade server market in 2Q 2007 grew by 165 per cent over 2Q 2006 in terms of factory revenues, which corresponded to approximately 8 per cent of the total India Server market revenues during the quarter. The growth in shipments of Blade servers clearly shows that its adoption is on the rise and that CIOs are becoming more aware about manageability, space and cooling aspects of Data Centers. The vendors are also playing a significant role in terms of launching new products and technology and creating awareness amongst users.