Server market 2005
IDC has published their annual Server Tracker report, and CNET pulls out some highlights:
- “The overall server market grew 4.4 percent to $51.3 billion from 2004 to 2005″ and “much of the growth took place in lower-end servers costing $25,000 or less”
- “Blade server revenue grew 84 percent from $1.15 billion in 2004 to $2.11 billion in 2005. Meanwhile, blades themselves got more powerful and their average price rose from $3,750 to $4,200″
- IBM had more than 40% of the blade market, and HP almost 35%.
- “Computer makers sold $17.7 billion worth of Windows servers worldwide in 2005 compared with $17.5 billion in Unix servers” — the first time Windows tops the Unix category.
- “Linux took third place, bumping machines with IBM’s mainframe operating system, z/OS” — note IDC separates Linux and Unix numbers.
- in the Unix segment, “IBM secured the top spot in 2005, with 31.8 percent of the market to Hewlett-Packard’s 29.8 percent and Sun’s 26.2 percent.”
- “IBM led the overall market in 2005 in terms of revenue, with $16.9 billion in sales and 32.9 percent share, IDC said. But IBM’s growth was slower than the overall market, and the company lost 0.3 percentage points of share.”
- “Two major server companies that grew faster than the overall market:
- HP (#2), with 8.9 percent growth to $14.2 billion
- Dell (#3), with 13.3 percent growth to $5.3 billion.”
- Sun (#4) revenue shrank 4.9 percent to $4.9 billion — hopes to rebound in 2006 with “new “Galaxy” line of x86 servers and UltraSparc T1 “Niagara”-based servers“
- “Sun is trying to restore Unix fortunes as well by making Solaris an open-source project and bringing it to x86 servers.” That faces an uphill battle for open-source mindshare with Fedora Core - version 4 was released in June 2005.
