Linux surmounts Windows in global server growth

According to the key findings of IDC's worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, Linux server sales revenues increased by 56.9% and unit shipments at 46.4%, while Windows servers posted double-digit growth, with revenues up by 16.4% and unit shipments up by 26.5% in year-over-year comparison.

Among the other key findings, factory revenue in the worldwide server market grew at 7.3% y-o-y to $11.5 billion in the first quarter of 2004, marking the fourth consecutive quarter of positive overall growth. It was also the second consecutive quarter in which all major categories of the worldwide server market grew when compared to the same period in the previous year.

As per the report, Dell and Sun Microsystems were in a statistical tie for the number third spot in the rankings of server vendors, based on worldwide factory revenue results that differed by less than 1%.

Some of the other results were IBM’s holding on to its numero uno spot in the worldwide server systems market with 29.7% market share in factory revenue, while in terms of shipment HP took the cake though, however, in factory revenue it achieved a second spot with 26.9% share.

The breadth of growth shows that demand for server systems is on the rise, although seasonal variations caused first-quarter revenues to be less than fourth-quarter revenues. "IT spending is clearly trending upward and IT organizations are beginning to rebuild their computing infrastructure,” said Vernon Turner, group vice president of Global Enterprise Server Solutions at IDC.

The x86 server market dynamics continued to be strong in the first quarter of 2004, with factory revenue growing 14.1% to $5.1 billion worldwide, while unit shipments grew 23.5% to more than 1.3 million servers worldwide, the release stated.

The worldwide server market continues to show signs of a strong recovery, with four consecutive quarters of growth in factory revenue. Apparently, the server-market landscape is undergoing major change as the influence of new technologies, including Linux, clustering, and server blades, is forging new deployments of IT infrastructure.

IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker is a quantitative tool for analyzing the global server market on a quarterly basis. The Tracker includes quarterly shipments (both ISS and upgrades) and revenues (both customer and factory), segmented by vendor, family, model, region, operating system, price band, CPU type, and architecture.