By Timothy Prickett Morgan
Hot on the heels of a survey of the corporate web server installed base that showed that Compaq has surpassed Sun Microsystems as the provider of primary servers on which companies deploy their web servers, Ziff Davis Market Intelligence has released a more general survey profiling the entire corporate server installed base, including not only web servers, but print, file, application and other kinds of servers.
Compaq has come out on top in this survey as well, beating server revenue leader IBM Corp. ZDMI’s comparative ranking of server vendors is based surveys of hundreds of thousands of small, medium and large organizations in North America and Europe. After talking about IT departments about their equipment and software and putting the information in a relat ional data base, ZDMI’s analysts take a look at market share figures from various consultants and vendors and then create a computerized model of the entire installed base of computers at corporations in those regions.
The database, thanks to its relational capabilities, allows ZDMI clients to dice and slice the installed base in myriad ways. The server installed base survey just released by ZDMI is based on information and models for the US market only, and it is culled from information extracted from commercial, governmental, educational, medical and other public and private institutions, and includes servers of all makes, models and vintages so long as they are still burning electricity.
The company reckons that there are 3.17 million servers installed in the US, and that Compaq has got its label on 19.5% of those machines, or about 618,000 servers. The company’s DEC unit, says ZDMI, has about 5.5% of the installed base; Tandem has only a sliver since it sells very large machines but very few footprints. Nonetheless, that gives Compaq about 792,000 servers installed in the US.
IBM, the number two vendor by ZDMI’s reckoning, has about 18.3% of the US installed server base, or about 580,000 machines installed. Based on other ZDMI market data not included in this survey and anecdotal evidence from IBM, that should mean about 380,000 of those machines are Netfinity servers, 130,000 are AS/400s, 50,000 are RS/6000s, 4,000 or so are S/390s and the remaining 16,000 are all kinds of earlier kit that will probably not survive the millennial change, such as System/36s, System/38s, Series/1s, 3080s and 3090s.
According to ZDMI’s market model for the US, Hewlett-Packard has the number three slot in the US installed base with 12.4% of installs, followed up by 9.9% from Sun Microsystems. Dell Computer, only very recently a force in the server market, is hot on Sun’s heels with 6.9% of installed servers. Gateway and Apple got 3.6% each, and Silicon Graphics garnered 3% of installs according to ZDMI. The hundreds of server vendors in the Others category collectively account for 17.4% of installed servers in the US.
What remains absent from ZDMI numbers is a sense of whether or not Compaq is pulling away from the pack, at least in terms of shipments, even if the company is having a tough time increasing revenues and profits as it goes through merger, CEO and product transitions. Compaq expects to ship close to 1 million servers this year worldwide (that’s about 29% growth from last year), and IBM may do better and grow by 40% to ship 600,000 units worldwide across all of its product lines. If server shipments go up by 35% worldwide – which implies a higher growth rate in the US because Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Asia/Pacific regions are still not carrying their weight – Compaq could actually lose a point of share even as it sells more machines than any vendor in history ever did in a single year. IBM could actually gain a point of market share in the US installed base as well, and odds are that Sun, HP and Dell will take more than a point or two of share as well. á
