Gartner Says Asia Pacific Server Market Continued Its Momentum as Shipments Increased 15.6 Percent in Second Quarter 2008

Singapore, September 2, 2008 — In the second quarter of 2008, Asia Pacific server shipments posted another healthy growth of 15.6 percent year-on-year.  Revenue increased 5.4 percent year-on-year, according to Gartner, Inc.  Server revenues totaled US$2.01 billion for the quarter, as server shipments reached 390,758 units.

Despite the US downturn, healthy economic conditions in many of the emerging markets in the region like India, Indonesia and Vietnam is fuelling IT spending across various industries.

The x86 server segment turned out to be the key growth contributor (see Table 1), especially in bigger markets like Greater China and Australia and New Zealand (ANZ).  Continued improvement in x86 technology coupled with growing adoption of virtualization technology is driving demand for configuration rich 2-way and 4-way processors.

Furthermore, x86 blade servers have shown another strong double-digit year-on-year growth of 78 percent in shipments and 66 percent in revenue during the second quarter of 2008 over the same quarter last year, encouraged by the rising demand for data centres. HP is the leading blade server vendor in both shipments and revenue.

For overall server market revenue in the Asia Pacific region, IBM remained 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 (see Table 2).

By shipments, HP led with 30 percent market share in the second quarter of 2008 thanks to its Itanium-based Integrity server line, which continued to show a healthy increase of 45 percent on 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 at 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.”

The RISC server segment shrank further in its revenue share to 34 percent in Q208 from 35 percent in 2Q07. IBM was the sole growth contributor in this space.

“It seems that IBM’s business realignment, especially for System p and System i, in the beginning of the year has increased users’ confidence, particularly in Korea and emerging markets like India, Indonesia and Vietnam,” said Ms. Gadjuli.  “Meanwhile Sun continued to face challenges this quarter, unable to repeat last year’s success.”

Table 1: Asia/Pacific: Server Market Trend by CPU 2Q2008, Revenue and Shipment

Source: Gartner Dataquest (August 2008)

Table 2: Asia/Pacific: Server Vendor Revenue Estimates, 2Q2008(U.S. Dollars)

Source: Gartner Dataquest (August 2008)

Contact:


Susan Moore
Gartner
+61 2 9459 4692
susan.moore@gartner.com


About Gartner:
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