Gartner: Server Growth Up 8.9 Percent in 2006

The server market continues to grow at a healthy rate, with blade servers and x86 showing the greatest strength while RISC continues its decline, according to the 2006 worldwide server report just released from Gartner.

Worldwide server shipments totaled 8.2 million units in 2006, an 8.9 percent increase from the 7.5 million shipped in 2005. Once again, Hewlett-Packard (Quote)  led the pack with 27.5 percent of the market, followed by Dell (Quote) with 21.7 percent and IBM (Quote) with 15.7 percent. Sun Microsystems (Quote)  was a distant fourth with 4.5 percent of the market.

In terms of dollars, revenue in 2006 was $52.7 billion, up just two percent from $51.6 billion in 2005. Gartner attributed this to a slowdown in x86 server sales. “Most of that slowdown seems to be attributable to a lengthening of the sales cycle due to the anticipated introduction of quad-core x86 processors with some lesser impact from x86 server virtualization,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner in a statement.

IBM continued to lead in terms of dollars, with $16.9 billion in sales and 32.1 percent of the total revenue pie, thanks to growth across the board but especially in its System Z and zSeries mainframes, which were up 10.3 percent in 2006. Clearly the mainframe is not dead, despite almost yearly attempts to declare it so.

“Mainframes were the fastest growing segment of the server market in 2006, which shows just how relevant these systems are to customers today,” said Bob Hoey, vice president IBM System z, in a statement emailed to internetnews.com. “This growth can be attributed to the launch of the System z Business Class mainframe during the year, as well a $100 million investment to simplify the platform and the uptake of workloads driven by the launch of specialty processors for Linux and Java.”

While its market share was flat, Sun did see a nice bounce in revenue, reversing a yearly decline that had been going on since 2001. Sun’s revenues jumped 15.4 percent, to $5.7 billion. By contrast, IBM was up only 1.7 percent over 2005 sales, Dell revenue was essentially flat at 0.4 percent growth and HP fell by 2.3 percent.

Naturally, Sun is pleased. “We have the best server line-up in our history, an unmatched asset in Solaris 10, and a sales force that is working closely with customers who believe network computing delivers a competitive advantage. We’re happy with the progress we’ve made over the past year, but plan to keep
working hard to build on our success,” said John Fowler, executive vice president of Systems at Sun in comments e-mailed to internetnews.com.

HP was the overall unit leader, with 27.5 percent of the market and the top x86 server vendor, with 28.5 percent of the market, while Sun was the leader in the RISC/Itanium Unix market with 54.1 percent. However, the RISC/Itanium market was down 1.6 percent in unit sales over 2005. HP’s percentage of the RISC market was down 10.1 percent as it transitions off of its PA-RISC.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.

RELATED NEWS AND ANALYSIS

• Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  December 04, 2020

• Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 18, 2020

• Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  November 10, 2020

• Top 10 AIOps Companies

  FEATURE |  By Samuel Greengard,
  November 05, 2020

• What is Text Analysis?

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 02, 2020

• How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 29, 2020

• Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 23, 2020

• The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 16, 2020

• Top 10 Chatbot Platforms

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  October 07, 2020

• Finding a Career Path in AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  October 05, 2020

• CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  September 25, 2020

• Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 25, 2020

• Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2020

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  September 22, 2020

• NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 18, 2020

• Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 14, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 13, 2020

• IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 11, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  September 09, 2020

• Anticipating The Coming Wave Of AI Enhanced PCs

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 05, 2020

• The Critical Nature Of IBM’s NLP (Natural Language Processing) Effort

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  August 14, 2020