News

IDC: Q4 2010 Server Sales Highest in 3 Years

According to IDC on Monday, the global server market yielded very positive results in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Worldwide server shipments for Q4 of 2010 increased by 6.1 percent over Q4 2009, according to the IDC report. The 2.1 million increase in units sold and $15.0 billion in revenue made it the highest period of growth in the overall market in three years. The server industry grew in every quarter during 2010, accounting for a $48.1 billion revenue increase over 2009's total numbers.

The global market for x86 servers grew 21.4 percent in Q4 to $9.0 billion, representing "the highest quarterly revenue ever reported for x86 servers," according to IDC. However, the report also cited growth from non-x86 platforms.

"Non-x86 platforms contributed significantly to the server market recovery in the fourth quarter and it remains clear that a variety of heterogeneous server platforms remain an integral part of a comprehensive enterprise IT strategy today," said IDC Enterprise Platform Group Vice President Matt Eastwood. "At the same time, datacenters are being optimized to support virtualization, automation, convergence, workload-optimized systems, and cloud strategies in both large and small organizations around the globe."

As for individual server vendor results, IBM once again claims the top spot, with revenue growth of 69.1 percent year-over-year for Q4. This result is due largely to higher-than-expected sales of its System z servers running z/OS. According to IDC, the $1.7 billion revenue jump is the largest increase it has reported for IBM.

Windows servers also experienced a positive bump in demand, thanks to high x86 server market refreshes, leading to an increase of 42.1 percent of quarterly revenue. The overall x86 sector shipped over 2 million servers for Q4 of 2010.

"Within the x86 market, high-end servers showed higher growth rates for both server shipments and revenue than low-end servers," said IDC senior analyst Reuben Miller. "With the introduction of higher performing processors with multiple cores, customers are finding more benefit in purchasing multi-socket server units than single socket systems."

Oracle's Sun brand was unable to follow the overall upward market trend; it experienced a Q4 decrease of 14.4 percent, compared with 2009's Q4 result. Fujitsu also saw its revenue drop by 9.4 percent in Q4.

About the Author

Chris Paoli (@ChrisPaoli5) is the associate editor for Converge360.

Featured

  • Microsoft Appoints Althoff as New CEO for Commercial Business

    Microsoft CEO and chairman Satya Nadella on Wednesday announced the promotion of Judson Althoff to CEO of the company's commercial business, presenting the move as a response to the dramatic industrywide shifts caused by AI.

  • Broadcom Revamps VMware Partner Program Again

    Broadcom recently announced a significant update regarding its VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) program, coinciding with the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, a key component in Broadcom’s private cloud strategy.

  • Closeup of the new Copilot keyboard key

    Microsoft Updates Copilot To Add Context-Sensitive Agents to Teams, SharePoint

    Microsoft has rolled out a new public preview for collaborative "always on" agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot, bringing enhanced, context-aware tools into Teams channels, meetings, SharePoint sites, Planner workstreams and Viva Engage communities.

  • Windows 365 Cloud Apps Now Available for Public Preview

    Microsoft announced this week that Windows 365 Cloud Apps are now available for public preview. This aims to allow IT administrators to stream individual Windows applications from the cloud, removing the need to assign Cloud PCs to every user.