q3
Server manufacturers may have heaved a collective sigh of relief with the latest release of revenue and shipment data from Gartner. While revenue was down 15.5% to $10.7 billion, when compared to Q3 of 2008, revenue and shipment growth over Q2 of 2009 indicates the beginnings of recovery in this segment. Unit shipments declined by 17.1% to 1.9 million, indicating that the servers sold during Q3 this year were more expensive, which supports the concept of new, powerful servers supporting extensive workloads with virtualization. No. 1 IBM topped the share race with a gain of 1%in revenue share to 31.7%. No. 2 HP (30.2%) and No. 3 Dell (13.4%) both gained in share, with Dell gaining the most. All gains were at the expense of Sun, the only vendor to report declines in revenue over Q2.
