Strong demand in Asia, Latin America and the U.S. buoyed overall demand for new servers, particularly x86-based boxes, but increased competition between the top-tier manufacturers kept overall revenue growth mostly in check.
As Server Watch reports, the latest figures show that U.S.-based companies are finally starting to upgrade their aging hardware to accommodate new software refreshes, escalate their virtualization efforts and build out new cloud-based data centers.
According to IT researcher Gartner, HP once again led the way among server vendors with 32.1 percent of the x86 market. Dell was second at 24.7 percent while IBM checked in at 12 percent. Fujitsu, which has made a concerted effort to target the U.S. enterprise market, reported an impressive 33 percent surge in year-to-year server shipment growth.
It wasn’t all good news, however. The RISC market took it in the shorts across the board with, Oracle (via its Sun Microsystems acquisition) reporting a 41.9 percent decline in shipments versus the first quarter of last year.
.
Server vendors have started off 2010 on a positive note by reversing a year of declining sales. First quarter worldwide server shipments jumped 23 percent while revenue increased just 6 percent according to IT research firm Gartner, thanks to price pressures keeping prices down.
The growth, however, was one-sided. x86-based servers grew 25.3 percent in units and 32.1 percent in revenue, but RISC/Itanium Unix servers declined 28.5 percent in units and 26.9 percent in revenue, and the ‘other’ CPU category, which is mostly mainframes, fell 15.1 percent in revenue, according to Gartner.
