Worldwide server shipments in the third quarter of 2011 grew 7.2 percent year-on-year, while revenue increased 5.2 percent year-on-year, according to Gartner, Inc.

"The third quarter of 2011 produced growth on a global level, but there was some significant variation in growth by region," said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner. "All regions showed growth in both shipments and vendor revenue except for Western Europe, which posted a 4.9 percent decline in revenue for the period. Asia/Pacific grew the most significantly in shipments with a 23.9 percent increase. Eastern Europe posted the highest vendor revenue growth at 27.4 percent for the period."

"x86 servers forged ahead and grew 7.6 percent in units and 9.3 percent in revenue. Some regions like Western Europe and the United States did not produce as much relative x86-based server growth because of comparatively stronger third quarter results in 2010. RISC/Itanium Worldwide UNIX server shipments declined 6.8 percent, but vendor revenue increased 3.5 percent compared to the same quarter last year. The 'other' CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, showed a decline of 6.9 percent," Hewitt said.

All of the top five global vendors had revenue increases for the third quarter of 2011 except HP and Oracle. HP declined 3.6 percent year-on-year and Oracle achieved flat growth. IBM took the lead in the worldwide server market based on revenue (see Table 1) — the company posted just over $3.8 billion in server vendor revenue for a total share of 29.7 percent for the third quarter of 2011. This share was down 0.5 percent year-on-year. Most of IBM’s revenue growth came from its Power Systems line with some contribution by System x as well.

Table 1
Worldwide: Server Vendor Revenue Estimates, 3Q11 (US Dollars)

Source: Gartner (November 2011)

In server shipments, HP remained the worldwide leader in the third quarter of 2011 (see Table 2) in spite of a year-on-year shipment decline of 3.1 percent for the quarter. This decline was driven primarily by drops in HP’s ProLiant brand. HP’s worldwide server shipment share was 29.2 percent representing a 3.1 percent drop in share from the same quarter in 2010.

In terms of server form factors, blade servers rose 3.3 percent in shipments and 7.6 percent in revenue for the quarter. The rack-optimized form factor climbed 8.2 percent in shipments and 6.3 percent in revenue for the third quarter of 2011.

Table 2
Worldwide: Server Vendor Shipment Estimates, 3Q11 (Units)

Source: Gartner (November 2011)

Additional information is available to subscribers of Gartner’s Servers Quarterly Statistics Worldwide program. This program provides worldwide market size and share data by vendor revenue and unit shipments. Segments include: region, vendor, vendor brand, sub brand, CPU type, CPU group, Max CPU, platform, price band, operating systems and distribution channels.

Gartner analysts will provide additional analysis on server trends further at the 30th Annual Gartner Data Center Conference, December 5-8 in Las Vegas. This event delivers a wealth of strategic guidance and tactical recommendations on the hottest issues, including servers, next-stage virtualization, the impact of cloud computing, mobility, storage, facilities, business continuity and disaster recovery.

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