India, China to trigger server market growth

NEW DELHI: India and China will drive the server market growth in Asia Pacific during 2003 and will be the hot favorites of the vendors worldwide. According to the a recent Gartner-Dataquest report, while Asia Pacific region represents a small percentage of the worldwide server revenue, IT vendors and service providers have increased their focus in the region as the global market has become tougher and growth is hard to come by. The research agency estimates a 9.9% increase in server shipments for the region during this period.

According to the report, the competitive nature of the server market in this region has been fueled by MNCs who have been focusing heavily on issues such as server consolidation and blade server advantages. "Their investment in these areas has led to sustained growth in this segment in the region," the report added.

The report also talks about the factors that would drive server growth in the region. According to the report, growth in the Asia Pacific region is being driven by strong demand from the finance sectors, especially banking, coupled with continued investment from many of the region's governments as they seek to capitalize on the benefits of IT.

"While a number of disruptive technologies, including Linux and blade servers, will help drive volume server sales, a need for mature markets to consolidate systems will lead to significant investments in server and systems consolidation toward the second half of 2003," the report predicts. Analysts at the research agency also suggest that the momentum around consolidation will help fuel revenue growth despite the declining average selling price of servers.

The research firm had in December last predicted that the overall server market in 2003 would grow by 3.5% and 6,66,500 servers will be shipped generating $5.6 billion in revenue.