Gartner figures add to server gloom

There was more bad news for the server market today, after Gartner added to IDC's gloomy analysis by announcing that worldwide server shipments dropped 28 percent year on year in the past quarter.

Gartner's latest figures show worldwide server revenues falling 29.4 percent year on year in the second quarter of 2009. EMEA was the worst hit region with a 31.9 percent decline in shipments and a 35.8 percent drop in vendor revenues.

IBM continued to lead the worldwide server market based on revenue, posting just over US$3bn ($3.57bn) and cornering 32.5 percent of the market.

HP was second with 29.2 percent, despite a year-on-year decline of 30 percent, while Dell took the third spot, beating Sun Microsystems by a few percentage points.

"The server market remains constrained on a worldwide level," said Jeffrey Hewitt, a research vice president at Gartner.

"Server sales have felt the impact of reduced budgets since the last half of 2008, and the second quarter of this year remained in the negative."

Hewitt added that no server segment had managed to buck the recession. x86-based server shipments fell 27.4 percent over the quarter, and RISC/Itanium Unix servers were heavily affected with a fall in shipments of 40.6 percent.

Gartner warned that growth in the overall server market is unlikely before next year.