Gartner: Server sales show modest growth
Sales up 4% in first quarter
News Story by Robert McMillan
MAY 26, 2005 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Led by strong sales from market-leader IBM, worldwide server sales were up 4% during the first quarter of 2005, according to research released by Gartner Inc.
Total server revenue for the quarter was $12.33 billion, up from $11.84 billion during the first quarter of 2004. IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Inc. were the top three server vendors, with sales of $3.67 billion, $3.47 billion and $1.33 billion for the period, respectively.
With a 16% rise in sales of x86-based servers, which use processors from Intel Corp.and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., HP actually shipped the largest number of servers by a wide margin. HP shipped a total of 498,000 servers during the quarter, followed by Dell and IBM, which sold 402,000 and 183,000 systems, respectively.
Sales of servers with AMD's Opteron processor accounted for 5.7% of the 1.6 million-unit x86 market. This was a slight improvement from the 5.4% market share Opteron held during the previous quarter, but still far from AMD's stated goal of 12% market share by year's end.
In total, 92,000 Opteron systems shipped during the quarter, led by HP, with just under 12,000 shipments, and Sun Microsystems Inc., which sold nearly 9,000 Opteron servers. The vast majority of Opteron sales, however, were made by smaller, lesser-known vendors.
Intel's 64-bit Xeon processor accounted for 797,000 systems sold during the quarter.
"Opteron is still a viable product," said Joseph Gonzalez, a Gartner analyst. "You can run a lot of your older applications on it. It's also a little bit lower-priced than some of the Xeon offerings. It's not going to make a huge inroad into Intel's sales, but it's going to bring in a lot of revenue for AMD."
Unix sales were up slightly for the quarter, but IBM was the only one of the top three vendors to see its Unix business grow. The company had Unix sales of $1.23 billion for the quarter, followed by HP, which had sales of $1.17 billion. Third-place Sun saw its Unix sales drop from $1.21 billion to $1.13 billion, year over year.
Despite marketing efforts to promote itself as an x86 vendor, Sun's overall revenue dropped as well during the period. During the first quarter of 2004, Gartner estimated that Sun sold $1.22 billion in servers. For the most recent quarter, sales dropped to $1.17 billion.
