BANGALORE, INDIA: Indian server market was poised at $141.5 million during the second quarter of 2009, registering an annual decline of 31.6 percent this year, according to Gartner, Inc.

Naveen Mishra, senior research analyst, Gartner, said: “The Indian market managed to post a sequential growth of 7.3 percent this quarter, which can be interpreted as early signs of initial recovery in the hardware market. Almost 47 percent of the revenue was accounted by the x86 technology this quarter.”

This improvement in the customer demand this quarter has been primarily driven by x86 technology which grew around 11 percent. Consolidation efforts specially virtualization has helped this market traction coupled with the recent product launches by OEM’s using the newly released Nehalem processors across the country.
This further drove the shipment of feature rich highly configured x86 servers during the second quarter of the year. Interestingly, the market also witnessed a significant increase in the Average Selling prices of x86 servers, which boosted the revenue. Key x86 server vendors like HP, IBM and Dell contributed significantly towards the momentum this quarter. 

The non x86 category (Itanium, RISC and others) also saw a marginal improvement of 5.2% in terms of revenue, quarter over quarter. Itanium and RISC were the key contributor towards this activity, which was primarily led by HP, IBM and Sun.

The market demand was quite broad this quarter. Especially segments like telecom, government and banks were the key contributors to the majority of the business. IT Services, manufacturing showed signs of demand this quarter, which could be considered as a positive indication for the upcoming quarters.

APAC server shipments decline in 2Q09
In the second quarter of 2009, Asia Pacific continued its downward trend in server shipments with 17.2 percent year on year decline, with shipments totaling 323,388 units.

Server vendor revenue for the second quarter reached $1.71 billion, down 15 percent compared to the same period a year ago.

Generally, constrained server spending remained in the background for most medium and large enterprises in Asia Pacific, although there was growth in units shipped (11 percent) and revenue (4.6 percent) over the previous quarter. The sequential growth came particularly from Australia, benefiting from government’s stimulus program. Australia had slight revenue decline of 2.5 percent year-on-year, while it doubled from 1Q 2009. Gartner expects the government’s stimulus plan will continue to inspire business confidence in Australia and drive further server demand in the second half of 2009.

In other developed countries, weak server demand generally continued to persist when compared to the same quarter of 2008, with the biggest revenue declines recorded in Singapore (-36.8 percent), Hong Kong (-48.3 percent), Taiwan (-33.7 percent) and Korea (-30.7 percent).