InternetIDC: Q2 Server Sales Have Their Own Price

Servers are getting cheaper to buy, especially x86 servers.

IDC has released its Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker for the second quarter of 2008 and the results mirror that of last week's figures from Gartner, in that to gain sales, vendors are dropping the price significantly. Factory revenue in the worldwide server market grew 6.4 percent year over year to $13.9 billion in the second quarter of 2008, while unit server shipments grew 11.1 percent year over year. While the collective numbers are up, some segments are down because of intense price competition, so much so that companies are actually down in revenues year over year. For example, for the year, IBM (NYSE: IBM) enjoyed a nice 13.8 percent jump in revenue, but dollar sales in its x86 business actually fell 4.8 percent, while unit sales were up 6.1 percent. IBM's stellar quarter came from the high-end picking up for slack on the low end. His came after IBM merged its System i and System p lines earlier this year and thanks to pent up demand for mainframes and the release of the z10 server. RELATED ARTICLES Gartner: Server Market Still Healthy Overall in Q2 For more stories on this topic: "We saw a real competitive pricing environment out there, and it looked like people are pushing stuff out the door," Jed Scaramella, senior research analyst for Enterprise Platforms at IDC, told InternetNews.com. "There are a couple of things behind that, we suspect it's mostly to get their footprint... [ Read more on www.internetnews.com ]

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