IDC outlines server market trends

A new power base in consumer markets, along with open source platforms and mass commoditisation, will drive the server market through the next decade, according to IDC.

IDC analyst Debra Goldfarb said at the researcher's conference this week that scalable architectures and clustering technologies, along with language recognition, will be important areas of research.

Goldfarb predicted that within the next 10 years, Intel's IA-64 will cross over Risc, followed by an emerging technology called microsystems which will subsequently cross over IA-64. IDC defines microsystems as the migration of server functionality onto silicon.

"Consumer suppliers and new competition rules will dominate the marketplace in 2010 along with relationships with customers and brand equity," she said. Points of presence will also dominate, she added, and Cisco will be an extremely important player.

IDC analyst Vernon Turner said more bandwidth, storage and processing power will also be required in the server market. He pointed out that terabytes will be replaced by petabytes, and that server divisions will add storage divisions over the next few years.

Trends in the server market are set to include network wireless, peer-to-peer and cheaper storage, according to Turner. "There will be no slow down and new players and new revenues will be added, although there will be some mergers and acquisitions," he said.

Turner also pointed to a number of hot spots including Linux, Windows NT and 2000, and Unix. "It looks like this will be the year Unix sold more than ever before."

There will continue to be fierce competition between IBM, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard, Compaq and Dell, which together make up 65 per cent of the server market.

"As the market continues to grow, so do they," said Turner, adding that as the top tier vendors get larger, the lesser fry are getting smaller.