Gartner: Server shipments up 23 percent in Q1 2010

Worldwide server shipments grew 23 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2010, while revenue increased 6 percent, according to Gartner, Inc.

"We've seen a return to growth on a worldwide level, but the market has not yet returned to the historical quarterly highs that were posted in 2008, and there were some interesting variations in that growth," said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner. "Emerging regions that were expected to grow, such as Asia/Pacific, forged ahead, while some mature markets, such as the U.S., produced better-than-expected results, as other countries and regions had a 'mixed bag' of results."

"The server segments varied as well. x86-based servers grew 25.3 percent in units and 32.1 percent in revenue. RISC/Itanium Unix servers were not positive, with declines of 28.5 percent in units and 26.9 percent in vendor revenue, and the 'other' CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, fell 15.1 percent in revenue for the quarter," Mr. Hewitt said.

From a regional standpoint, the U.S. grew the most significantly in shipments, with a 28.6 percent increase, while Latin America had the highest vendor revenue growth at 27.9 percent for the period. All other regions had varying shipment and revenue increases with one exception — Japan posted a revenue decline of 0.7 percent.

HP took the lead in the worldwide server market based on revenue (see Table 1). HP's server revenue reached $3.4 billion, representing 31.5 percent of the market, in the first quarter of 2010. This share was up 2.7 percentage points year over year.

IBM fell from the No. 1 spot, and it sustained a 2.1 percent revenue decline for the quarter, affected primarily by anticipated new products in both its mainframe and Unix lines.

Of the top five global vendors, Dell, Fujitsu and HP all had revenue increases for the first quarter of 2010.

In server shipments, HP remained the worldwide leader for the first quarter of 2010 (see Table 2) with a shipment increase of 26.6 percent. This growth was driven by increases produced from HP's ProLiant brand.

Of the top five vendors in server shipments worldwide, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, and IBM posted increases in units for the first quarter.

As noted above, the primary driver for market growth in the quarter was the x86-based server hardware platform. There was a marked difference between x86-based servers and non-x86 server platforms for the quarter with the latter posting declines. Blade severs had the strongest growth of any form factor with an increase of 23.7 percent in units and 40.7 percent in vendor revenue for the first quarter.