Big Blue gets bigger

IBM increased its lead in a growing server market, nibbling away share from rivals Hewlett-Packard and Sun, according to figures to be released on Wednesday.

Sales of servers worldwide increased 5.5 per cent year-on-year to $11.5bn in the third quarter of 2004, according to market researcher IDC. IBM's sales grew faster, though, with revenue increasing 6.3 per cent to $3.4bn, giving Big Blue 31.7 per cent of the market.

The number two, HP, grew slower than the market, increasing sales from $3bn to $3.1bn. Dell and Sun were essentially tied for third place, with Sun at $1.18bn and Dell at $1.17bn -- but Dell's sales increased 14.1 per cent compared with Sun's 0.1 per cent, IDC said.

IDC analyst Vernon Turner said that the overall market growth has been under way for six consecutive quarters, but only recently has it become strong. Information technology spending now includes more new projects rather than just maintaining the status quo, he said.

"For a while the growth was close to inflation. Now we're seeing growth beyond inflation, which shows it is back to strategic thinking instead of just maintenance thinking," Turner said.

IBM and Dell rising while HP and Sun lose share of revenue has been a common theme in server market share statistics in recent quarters. So has the fifth-place position of Fujitsu and its European arm, Fujitsu-Siemens, whose sales grew 4.4 per cent to $714m.

In other findings:

• Linux server sales grew 42.6 per cent to $1.06bn -- the ninth consecutive quarter of growth greater than 10 per cent. HP leads the market with $287m in sales, with IBM in second at $219m and Dell third at $185m, Turner said.
• Mainstream x86 processors with 64-bit extensions to accommodate more memory, such as Intel's "Nocona" model of Xeon and AMD's Opteron, are catching on. About 60,000 Nocona-based servers and 52,000 Opteron servers were sold, IDC said. About 60 per cent of the Opteron systems run Linux, which supports the 64-bit extensions today, whereas most Nocona systems run 32-bit Windows, which won't get 64-bit x86 support until 2005.
• Overall, x86 server sales grew 18.3 per cent to $5.4bn, the third quarter in a row that they've been greater than sales of servers using reduced instruction set computing, or RISC, chips such as IBM's Power, Sun's UltraSparc and HP's PA-RISC.
• Unix servers, which most often use RISC chips, declined in sales 2.3 per cent to $4bn, though unit shipments increased 8.3 per cent.
• This quarter -- a seasonally weak one for longtime leader Sun -- Hewlett-Packard was number one in the Unix market at $1.27bn, Sun number two at $1.14bn and IBM number three at $1.05bn. IBM revenue increased two per cent, but Sun dropped two per cent, and HP lost six per cent.
• Revenue from servers running Windows grew 13.3 per cent to $3.9bn, essentially tying Unix server revenue.
• More than 75,000 blade servers were sold, a $287m market for the quarter, with IBM keeping its top spot with 44.2 per cent of revenue. Turner predicted blade servers will be a $1bn business for the full year of 2004.
• Blade servers are getting more powerful. "End-user spending for blade servers in the third quarter exceeded our expectations as we saw a shift in mix away from single-processor blades to dual- and quad-processor blade systems," IDC analyst Jessica Yang said in a statement.