A new report from Gartner shows the server market did great during all of 2007, including the fourth quarter. Server shipments rose 11 % during the fourth quarter, while revenue rose almost 3 %. The world’s server vendors combined to ship 2.4 million boxes during the fourth quarter and brought in $ 15.5 billion for their efforts. In all of 2007, shipments rose 7 %, while revenue jumped 4 %. For the entire year, vendors moved more than 8.8 million units and generated $ 54.8 billion in revenue, according to Gartner.
The rise of virtualization and the general economic slowdown, combined with trimmed budgets at the financial services companies, has left a lot of analysists proclaiming a big slowdown and even downfall in hardware sales. But so far, the sky seems blue.
Out of the top vendors, Hewlett-Packard enjoyed the strongest fourth quarter in terms of shipments. It grew 12 % year-over-year, while Dell grew at 9 %, IBM grew at 7 % and Sun declined by 6 %. Fujitsu-Siemens also enjoyed a super quarter with 18 % growth.
| Vendor | Q4 Shipments | Gain/Loss |
| 1) HP | 702,100 | 12% |
| 2) Dell | 499,687 | 8.8% |
| 3)IBM | 372,701 | 7.4% |
| 4)Sun | 84,778 | -6.3% |
| 5)Fujitsu/Siemens | 75,882 | 17.9% |
Almost all of the vendors saw their revenue rise during the fourth quarter. IBM stood out as the lone laggard, despite it talking an awful lot lately about how strong its server business is.
| Vendor | Revenue | Gain/Loss |
| 1) IBM | $5.3bn | -0.8% |
| 2)HP | $4.4bn | 7.6% |
| 3)Dell | $1.6bn | 4.1% |
| 4)Sun | $1.49bn | 1.0% |
| 5)Fujitsu/Siemens | $616k | 2.1% |
For the full year, HP stood out with 17 % growth in shipments, leading the herd. Sun was the biggest loser, dropping 8.3 %. In revenue, Dell was the main gainer, showing sales growth of 13.2 %. HP notched 9 % growth as well, while the rest of the vendors were in the low single digits.
Everyone moved a ton of x86 boxes and benefited from double-digit growth in terms of shipments. HP, Fujistu-Siemens and Sun had double-digit revenue growth as well, while Dell came in at 4 % and IBM hit 7 % growth.”Blade servers continue to be a high-growth segment with a revenue increase of 44.5 % and a shipment increase of 19.9 % for the year,” Gartner said. “HP was the 2007 leader with blades at a 41.7 % shipment share, with IBM being in second place at 30.9 %. These two vendors continued to dominate this form factor and totaled almost 78 % of the worldwide blade revenue share for 2007.”
[Source and tables: The Register]