Gartner figures add to server gloom

It has not been a good quarter for server sales

There was more bad news for the server market today, after Gartner added to IDC's gloomy analysis by announcing that worldwide server shipments dropped 28 per cent year on year in the past quarter.

Gartner's latest figures show worldwide server revenues falling 29.4 per cent year on year in the second quarter of 2009. EMEA was the worst hit region with a 31.9 per cent decline in shipments and a 35.8 per cent drop in vendor revenues.

IBM continued to lead the worldwide server market based on revenue, posting just over $3bn (£1.83bn) and cornering 32.5 per cent of the market. HP was second with 29.2 per cent, despite a year-on-year decline of 30 per cent, while Dell took the third spot, beating Sun Microsystems by a few percentage points.

"The server market remains constrained on a worldwide level," said Jeffrey Hewitt, a research vice president at Gartner. "Server sales have felt the impact of reduced budgets since the last half of 2008, and the second quarter of this year remained in the negative."

Hewitt added that no server segment had managed to buck the recession. X86-based server shipments fell 27.4 per cent over the quarter, and RISC/Itanium Unix servers were heavily affected with a fall in shipments of 40.6 per cent.

Gartner warned that growth in the overall server market is unlikely before next year.