Gartner said that worldwide server shipments in the third quarter of 2011 grew 7.2% year-on-year, while revenue increased 5.2% year-on-year.
Gartner research vice president Jeffrey Hewitt said the third quarter of 2011 produced growth on a global level but there was some significant variation in growth by region. He added, "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 grew strongly by7.6% in units and 9.3% in revenue, even as some regions like Western Europe and the United States did not produce as much x86-based server growth because of comparatively stronger third quarter results in 2010.
RISC/Itanium Worldwide Unix server shipments declined 6.8%, but vendor revenue increased 3.5% compared to the same quarter last year. The ‘other’ CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, showed a decline of 6.9%.
All of the top five global vendors had revenue increases for the third quarter of 2011 except HP and Oracle.While HP declined 3.6% year-on-year Oracle achieved flat growth.
IBM took the lead in the worldwide server market based on revenue posted just over $3.8 billion in server vendor revenue for a total share of 29.7% in third quarter of 2011. However, its share slipped 0.5% year-on-year.
HP remained the worldwide leader in the third quarter of 2011 in server shipments despite a year-on-year shipment decline of 3.1%, driven primarily by drops in HP’s ProLiant brand. HP’s worldwide server shipment marketshare was 29.2%, a 3.1% drop in share compared to the same quarter in 2010.
