In the first quarter (January-March) of 2011, worldwide server shipments grew 8.5 per cent year-on-year, while revenue increased by 17.3 per cent, according to IT research and advisory firm Gartner."The first quarter continued a quarterly trend of year-on-year growth in both shipments and vendor revenue. All regions showed growth in both shipments and vendor revenue, with the exception of Japan," Gartner Research vice president Jeffrey Hewitt said.
"x86 servers forged ahead and grew 8.6 per cent in units for the year and 17.5 per cent in revenue. Following earlier trends, the x86-based server market provided an increase in average selling prices that pushed revenue higher than shipments, and this was the case in the first quarter for all regions," he added.
RISC/Itanium Unix servers finally exited their slump and grew 5.2 per cent in shipments and 20.7 per cent in vendor revenue, compared with the same quarter last year.
The 'other' CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, showed a growth in vendor revenue of 19.6 per cent", the company stated.
From the regional stand point, Eastern Europe grew the most in shipments with a 21.1 per cent increase.
The region also posted the highest vendor revenue growth at 36.0 per cent for the period.
According to Gartner all the top five global vendors except Fujitsu had revenue increases for the first quarter of 2011.
Based on the worldwide server revenue, HP emerged as the market leader with over $3.8 billion revenue, accounting for a total share of 30.2 per cent during the first quarter of 2011.
This share was down 1.2 per cent year-on-year.
In server shipments, HP remained the worldwide leader during the first quarter of 2011, with a year-on-year shipment increase of 2.3
per cent for the quarter.
This growth was driven by increased produced from HP's ProLiant brand.
HP's worldwide server shipment share was 29.8 per cent, representing a 1.8 per cent drop in share as compared to the same period last year.
Of the top five vendors in server shipments worldwide, HP and IBM posted year-on-year increases in units for the first quarter.
In terms of server form factors, x86 blade servers rose 6.1 per cent in shipments and 24.6 per cent in revenue for the quarter, to produce the highest revenue growth by form factor.
The rack-optimised form factor had the highest shipment growth at 11.2 per cent and climbed 19.6 per cent in revenue for the first quarter, Gartner said.
