Has the bleeding really stopped? Research firm Gartner offers some hopeful news for the server market, finding a 4.5 percent increase in global shipments in the fourth quarter.
But the uptick wasn’t enjoyed equally all around. Server Watch takes a look at the winners and losers in the server rebound, and has the details on variations among different regions throughout the world.
The global economic slowdown has hit the server market particularly hard as firms have been extending the life spans of their servers by a few more years. The result was quarter after quarter of double-digit declines for all major server vendors.
But finally, the bleeding has stopped, or so Gartner reports. Worldwide server unit shipments grew 4.5 percent year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2009, but revenue fell 3.2 percent.
Not surprisingly, the Asia/Pacific region led way, thanks to the economic strengths of China and India, with 19.6 percent year-over-year growth. That was followed by the Middle East and Africa, where shipments increased 13.4 percent, and the United States, which rose 9.0 percent.
Eastern Europe saw the largest year-over-year decline in shipments, off 13.3 percent, followed by Canada, which slipped 9.4 percent, and Latin America off 6.8 percent. Western Europe dropped 4.0 percent, and Japan dipped 1.7 percent.
IBM (NYSE: IBM) was the principal beneficiary of the server rebound, with fourth-quarter unit sales rising 10.5 percent year-over-year, followed by Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) up 4.5 percent and HP (NYSE: HPQ) up 3.8 percent. Sun Microsystems, with the cloud of uncertainty hanging over its head due to the prolonged merger with Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL), plunged 23.8 percent.