3 November 2003 Strong third-quarter sales of low-end servers have provided a fresh sign of a growing recovery in the IT industry.
Global server shipments grew 20.8% to reach 1.4 million in the quarter, according to IT market research company Gartner. It is the third consecutive quarter to show growth.
Only embattled Sun Microsystems suffered a fall as most of the major vendors, including IBM, Dell and Hewlett-Packard (HP), reported big jumps in unit shipments.
“There are signs that the industry is in renewal mode, replacing end of life Windows NT systems with more advanced one and two-way servers which run the latest operating systems with faster CPUs,” Gartner said. “Although overall server demand is increasing, most of the activity is in lower priced Intel server systems, thereby limiting vendor revenue growth.”
IBM shipped 220,000 systems in the quarter, an increase of 37%. Dell server shipments grew 28% to 276,000 units, while HP’s shipments jumped 21% to 408,000. Sun, however, reported a 3% fall, to 60,000 units.
