Worldwide server sales continued to rise in the second quarter, reflecting a strong trend in systems consolidation, with revenues across the sector rising 6% to $11.5 billion.
The figures, from IDC, show that businesses are concentrating the bulk of their investments in the high and low ends of the servers market.
Revenue from Intel-based, so-called 'volume' servers grew 21% year-on-year, continuing to represent the primary growth engine for the server market. At the opposite end of the power curve, high-end enterprise servers showed 6% growth, with IBM mainframe revenues rising a stunning 41%. In contrast, revenue from mid-range enterprise servers declined by 12%.
Sales of Linux servers increased by 49%, reaching $900 million for the quarter, compared with sales of $3.6 billion for Windows servers, up 13% on the year-ago quarter.
"Spending remained strong with consolidation activities continuing to drive demand for high-end systems," says Matt Eastwood, server program director at IDC.
IBM garners the most market share, securing 32% of global sales, with revenues up 12% on the second quarter of 2003. Hewlett-Packard took a 27% share of the revenue pie, but topped the list for number of units sold.
And there was better news for Sun Microsystems, which had seen sales slip in recent times. Sun's revenues grew faster than any other top five vendor, with a 34% year-on-year increase. It also regained its position at the head of the worldwide Unix server market.
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