Gartner: APAC server shipments up 15.6 percent

The report for the second quarter of 2008, shows an increase by 15.6 percent and claims revenue has grown 5.4 percent year-on-year.

It says server revenues totaled US$2.01 billion for the quarter, as shipments reached 390,758 units.

A spokesman for Gartner said despite the US downturn, healthy economic conditions in regions like India, Indonesia and Vietnam is fuelling IT spending across industries.

In Australia, server shipments totaled 39,988 in the second quarter of 2008, a 14 percent increase over the same quarter last year.

However, total revenue was down year-on-year, from $358.4 million in Q1-07 to $283.7 million in Q2-08, due to increasing price competition, particularly in the x86 market.

The report claims improvement in x86 technology coupled with a growth of virtualisation technology is driving demand for configuration rich 2-way and 4-way processors.

It also said x86 blade servers have grown year-on-year of 78 percent in shipments and 66 percent in revenue during the second quarter of 2008 over the same quarter last year.

It believes this is thanks to a demand in data centres and said HP is the leading blade server vendor in both shipments and revenue.

For overall server market revenue in the APAC region, IBM is the leader.

Among the top five vendors, IBM and Dell were the revenue share gainers during the second quarter with 38 percent and 11 percent market share respectively.

By shipments, HP led with 30 percent market share in the second quarter of 2008 thanks to its Itanium-based Integrity server line, which increased 45 percent on an annual basis.

“HP continued its efforts to migrate customers from traditional HP PA-RISC to its Itanium server platforms and this has started bearing fruit,” said Erica Gadjuli, principle research analyst Gartner.

“As a result, we are observing only a slight growth of just over one percent year-on-year for the RISC server platform in Asia Pacific,” she added.