Gartner Says Worldwide Server Shipments Grew 6 Percent While Revenue Grew 4.5 Percent in First Quarter of 2007

Gartner Says Worldwide Server Shipments Grew 6 Percent While Revenue Grew 4.5 Percent in First Quarter of 2007

Worldwide server shipments for the first quarter of 2007 increased 6 percent over the same quarter last year, while worldwide server revenue for the same period climbed 4.5 percent according to Gartner, Inc. Worldwide server revenues totaled $12.9 billion for the quarter, as worldwide servers shipments reached just over 2.1 million units.

“x86 servers had been constrained in the fourth quarter of 2006 due to the lengthening sales cycles, following a period of particularly rapid technology transition,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, Research Vice President at Gartner. “As we had predicted, this constraint was less about virtualization and was only a temporary issue as evidenced by the fact that this part of the market returned to growth in the first quarter.”

“RISC-Itanium Unix servers fell 15.5 percent in shipments for the quarter and fell 1.5 percent in revenue,” Mr. Hewitt said. “The competition remains intense in this portion of the market as it continues to face declines.”

IBM continued to lead the worldwide server market based on revenue (see Table 1). It had increases for the quarter in System p/p Series, System x/x Series and System z/z Series while it experienced declines only in System i/i Series which combined to produce an overall revenue increase of 8.4 percent for the quarter and boosted IBM’s revenue share 1.1 percent. IBM’s shipments fell 1.1 percent for the quarter and it lost 1 percent of shipment share on a worldwide basis. IBM increased its blade server shipments 12.7 percent and its blade server revenue 15.5 percent, but it lost share to Hewlett-Packard which remained in the No. 1 position with that form factor.