Worldwide server revenues slump by 25 percent

Chicago (IL) – Figures released by IDC showed that revenues in the worldwide server market fell 24.5 percent in the first quarter of this year.

Revenues amounted to $9.9 billion and this is the third consecutive quarter of year on year revenue decline, said IDC. Indeed, this is the lowest quarterly server revenue since IDC records began, 12 years back.

Server unit shipments also fell by 26.5 percent in Q1 and is the lowest quarterly server shipment total in five years.

Volume systems fell by 30.5 percent year on year, midrange enterprise systems fell by 13.6 percent, and the high end enterprise segment also fell by 19.5 percent.

The reason is much to do with the economic meltdown. Matt Eastwood, group VP of enterprise platforms at IDC said: “Most enterprise organizations are deferring new IT procurements and focusing on extending server lifecycles.” Put into the language of the common man, this means big companies and organizations aren’t spending on new systems.

Microsoft Windows server revenue amounted to $3.7 billion in he first quarter, a 28.9 percent year on year fall. Microsoft holds 37.3 percent of server software revenue. Linux servers represented 13.8 percent and fell by 24.8 percent year on year to $1.4 billion.

The bad news for both Intel and AMD is that the X86 server market fell sharply in the first quarter, delivering $5.1 billion of revenues – IDC said this is the lowest X86 server revenue since the third quarter of 2003. HP here is number one, while Dell is in second place. The good news for AMD and Intel is that IDC expects X86 systems to rebound faster than the overall market in the coming quarters.

This is how the cookie crumbles for the top five corporate worldwide server systems factory revenues for the first quarter – the revenue figures are in millions.

Vendor Q109 revenues Q109 share Q108 revenues Q108 share Q109/Q108 growth
HP $2,913 29.3% $3,946 30% -26.2%
IBM $2,904 29.3% $3,624 27.6% -19.9%
Dell $1,093 11% $1,590 12.1% -31.2%
Sun $1,018 10.3% $1,367 10.4% -25.5%
Fujitsu $667 6.7% $821 6.2% -18.8%
Others $1,329 13.4% $1,799 13.7% -26.1%
All $9,924 100% $13,147 100% -24.5%