Global Server Revenue Declined in Q3

Gartner estimates that server vendors were able to increase their shipments by 3.6 percent in the third quarter, but suffered a 2.8 percent revenue decline at the same time.

IBM kept the market leadership with $3.48 billion of server revenue, down 9.5 percent year over year. HP followed with $3.30 billion, down 12.4 percent, while Dell in third place was the only major server maker that did not experience a drop in revenues (up 10.3 percent to $2.10 billion). Oracle fell 22.5 percent to $592 million and Fujitsu dropped 18.3 percent to $494 million.

HP, however, shipped the most server units - 634,793 units (down 8.4 percent), followed by Dell (564,475, up 9.0 percent), IBM (280,424, down 2.5 percent), Fujitsu (76,128, down 3.7 percent), and Cisco (55,973, up 40.4 percent).

The strongest was the x86 server market which showed a 4.0 percent revenue increase (+4.3 percent in shipments) in Q3 and the RISC/Itanium Unix server segment saw a 16.4 percent decline in revenue (-31.1 percent in shipments).

Despite the generally soft market, Gartner said that North America posted the best result. Shipments were up 7.4 percent and sales were up 1.1 percent.

Wolfgang Gruener is a contributor to Tom's IT Pro. He is currently principal analyst at Ndicio Research, a market analysis firm that focuses on cloud computing and disruptive technologies, and maintains the conceivablytech.com blog. An 18-year veteran in IT journalism and market research, he previously published TG Daily and was managing editor of Tom's Hardware news, which he grew from a link collection in the early 2000s into one of the most comprehensive and trusted technology news sources.

See here for all of Wolfgang's Tom's IT Pro articles.

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