* IDC says Linux server sales accounted for 9% of total server market in Q3
Every quarter, it seems like the same story: Linux server sales are hot. But the market recently hit a milestone.
For the third quarter of 2004, Linux server sales reached more than $1 billion for the first time in a single quarter, according to a recent report. Analyst firm IDC says Linux server sales – which it counts as servers shipped with Linux pre-installed on hardware – increased more than 42% from the third quarter of 2003. Overall, Linux accounted for around 9% of the total $11.5 billion server market last quarter.
HP was the top seller of Linux-based servers in the third quarter (as it was in the second quarter), with 26.9% of the total revenue. IBM came in second with 20%, while Dell had 17.4% of Linux server revenue for the quarter.
In overall server revenue, IBM was tops with 31.7% of the revenue followed by HP and Dell.
IDC says this was the ninth quarter in a row where Linux server sales increased by double digits. Windows servers also had strong growth as revenue and shipments of “Wintel” servers grew by 13% and 19%, respectively. IDC says that at $3.9 billion in sales, the Windows server market is almost equal in size to the overall Unix market. Unix, on the other hand, is slightly on the decline, IDC says; revenue from Unix server sales decreased by 2.3% from the third quarter a year ago.
