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 IT research firm Gartner. 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--the company posted just more than $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, the report said.
“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.”
In server shipments, HP remained the worldwide leader in the third
quarter of 2011 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.
“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,” Hewitt said.
“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.”
Data Center and Infrastructure 
