Global Server Shipments Grew 9%; Revenue Up 17% In Q1 FY11

In the first quarter of 2011, worldwide server shipments grew 8.5 percent year-on-year, while revenue increased 17.3 percent, according to Gartner, Inc.

“The first quarter continued a quarterly trend of year-on-year growth in both shipments and vendor revenue,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner. “All regions showed growth in both shipments and vendor revenue, with the exception of Japan.”

“x86 servers forged ahead and grew 8.6 percent in units for the year and 17.5 percent in revenue. Following earlier trends, the x86-based server market provided an increase in average selling prices that pushed revenue higher than shipments, and this was the case in the first quarter for all regions,” Hewitt said. “RISC/Itanium Unix servers finally exited their slump and grew 5.2 percent in shipments and 20.7 percent in vendor revenue, compared with the same quarter last year. The “other” CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, showed a growth in vendor revenue of 19.6 percent.”

From the regional standpoint, Eastern Europe grew the most significantly in shipments with a 21.1 percent increase. Eastern Europe also posted the highest vendor revenue growth at 36.0 percent for the period.

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All the top five global vendors except Fujitsu had revenue increases for the first quarter of 2011. HP was the market leader, based on worldwide server revenue (see Table 1). The company posted just over $3.8 billion in worldwide server vendor revenue for a total share of 30.2 percent for the first quarter of 2011. This share was down 1.2 percent year-on-year.

In server shipments, HP remained the worldwide leader in the first quarter of 2011 (see Table 2) with a year-on-year shipment increase of 2.3 percent for the quarter. This growth was driven by increases produced from HP’s ProLiant brand. HP’s worldwide server shipment share was 29.8 percent, representing a 1.8 percent drop in share from the same quarter in 2010.

Of the top five vendors in server shipments worldwide, HP and IBM posted year-on-year increases in units for the first quarter.

In terms of server form factors, x86 blade servers rose 6.1 percent in shipments and 24.6 percent in revenue for the quarter, to produce the highest revenue growth by form factor. The rack-optimised form factor had the highest shipment growth at 11.2 percent and climbed 19.6 percent in revenue for the first quarter.