According to Gartner, IBM was the leading player in the global server market in the first quarter of 2013. The company registered revenues of $3 billion with a market share of 25.5 per cent. For IBM, system x accounted for 29.3 per cent of its total server revenue.
Despite being the market leader, IBM’s market share in the first quarter of 2013 declined by 2.5 percentage points as compared to the corresponding period in 2012. In the period under consideration, global server shipments declined by 0.7 per cent year-on-year, while revenue declined by 5 per cent in comparison to the first quarter of 2012.
Further, Gartner says that growth was witnessed only in Asia Pacific and the US. Asia Pacific demonstrated the strongest growth with shipment and revenue increasing by 7 per cent and 1.7 per cent, respectively.
The research firm underlines that the growth in Asia Pacific and the US was not strong enough to offset the decline in server shipments and revenue share in the first quarter of 2013. The growth in shipments of the x86 server was flat for the period under review, while revenue from the product increased by 1.8 per cent. The global shipment and revenue share of the RISC and Itanium Unix servers declined by 38.8 per cent and 35.8 per cent respectively. The ‘other’ CPU category, comprising mainframes witnessed an increase of 3.6 per cent in global revenues. In the first quarter of 2013, the top five vendors except Dell witnessed decline in revenues. Dell’s revenue for the same period increased by 14.4 per cent.
In terms of server shipments, HP continued to be the worldwide leader in the first quarter of 2013. In spite of a year-on-year shipment decline of 15.2 per cent, Dell and Cisco were the only vendors in the top five to have registered positive shipment growth. In terms of server form factors, the shipment of blade servers declined by 5.9 per cent, though revenues of the product declined by 5 per cent. The shipment and revenues of the rack-optimised form factor registered a decline of 5.2 per cent and 2 per cent, respectively.
According to Gartner, in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) server shipments surpassed 580,000 units in the first quarter of 2013, registering a decline of 6.8 per cent as compared to the first quarter of 2013. The total server revenue in the region stood at $2.96 billion. In the first quarter of 2013, server revenues in Western Europe and Eastern Europe declined by 9.6 per cent and 9.4 per cent. In Africa server revenues registered a decline of 13.4 per cent.
Dell and Fujitsu were the only server vendors to witness revenue growth in EMEA. As per the research firm, this market would continue to witness slow growth, on account of low spending by enterprise customers.
