The Indian server market could show positive signs fuelled by pent up demand coupled with year end buying in the October-November-December (OND) quarter. Overall the Indian server market totalled at around $118 million during the July-August-September quarter registering a year-on-year decline of 28.3 per cent, according to Gartner Inc, an information technology research and advisory company.
The decline in this quarter could be partly contributed to the sluggish economic situation coupled with seasonality observed around this quarter, says the report. Overall, Hewlett Packard emerged as the market leader followed by IBM and Sun Microsystems. HP and IBM were the worst affected vendors due to the limited market server demand during this quarter in India.
x86 servers accounted for around 59 per cent of the market revenue leading to a revenue increase of 4.4 per cent, as compared to last quarter. This further suggests that India CIO’s have started selective purchase of servers, which can be considered as early signal of economic recovery, says Gartner. Indian companies have undertaken a lot server refresh and consolidation projects. “Virtualisation has been a key driver for such deployments in large as well as mid-market territory. On the other side, non x86 segment of the server witnessed a sequential decline of 35.9 per cent this quarter. Some of the large projects seem to be deferred for the next quarter,” says the report.
Worldwide server shipments for the third quarter of 2009 dropped 17.1 per cent over the same quarter last year, while worldwide server revenue for the same period declined 15.5 per cent, according to Gartner. Worldwide server revenues totalled $10.7 billion for the quarter, as worldwide servers shipments reached 1.2 million units.
“It is important to put the yearly declines into perspective,” says Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner. “Looking at the third quarter results from the sequential perspective, they showed an increase of 13.8 percent in shipments and 10.2 percent in revenues when compared to the second quarter of this year. That suggests that the market as a whole is showing signs of stabilisation as we move toward the end of 2009.”
IBM held the revenue lead in the worldwide server market for the quarter. IBM’s overall revenue share lead over second-place HP was 1.5 percent for the quarter. Four of the top 5 vendors posted double-digit declines in revenue year over year. However, all of the top tier vendors experienced sequential revenue growth, except for Sun Microsystems, says Gartner.
In server shipments, Hewlett-Packard retained its worldwide server shipment lead, as its market share reached 32.1 percent in the third quarter of 2009. Dell maintained the No. 2 ranking as its share totalled 22.8 per cent. HP’s shipment performance was driven primarily by its ProLiant brands. While the global server providers all posted year-on-year shipment declines for the quarter, all of the vendors experienced sequential shipment increases for the period.