It’s official: server sales are picking up again. HP and Dell said it on their earnings calls, Gartner said it earlier this week, and now the other major IT research firm, IDC, has said so. But the devil is in the details. While the overall figure for server sales is up, many of the segments are down, and one sector alone is carrying along the whole sector. Which is it? ServerWatch has the details.
IDC is the latest research firm to provide validation that the server market has begun to recover from multiple quarterly losses in 2009, although like rival analysts firm Gartner reported, IDC found that the recovery is lopsided: The x86 server business is booming while the non-x86 business is busting.
According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker for the first quarter of 2010, server unit shipments in the first quarter of 2010 rose 23.2 percent over Q1 2009, while revenues increased just 4.6 percent, an indication that there is still price pressure on servers. This represents the highest quarterly growth rate in five years, according to IDC.
