NEW YORK – In the fourth quarter of 2012, worldwide server shipments declined 0.2 percent year-on-year, while revenue increased 5.1 percent from the fourth quarter of 2011, according to Gartner. For year-end results, worldwide server shipments grew 1.5 percent in 2012, and server revenue declined 0.6 percent.
“2012 was a year that definitely saw budgetary constraint which resulted in delays in x86-based server replacements in enterprise and mid-sized data centers,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner. “Application-as-a-business data centers such as Baidu, Facebook and Google were the real drivers of significant volume growth for the year.”
“Relatively weak mainframe and RISC/Itanium Unix platform market performance kept overall revenue growth in check,” Hewitt said.
From a geographic perspective, the three highest growth rates were shown by North America (5.5 percent), Asia/Pacific (3.4 percent) and Latin America (0.2 percent) in terms of unit shipments. These were the only regions to experience an increase in shipments. These three regions grew at a rate of 16.3, 15.5 and 6 percent respectively.
IBM extended its lead in the worldwide server market based on revenue in the fourth quarter of 2012. In the fourth quarter, IBM’s server revenue reached $5.1 billion in the fourth quarter of 2012 to increase its global market share to 34.9 percent. This was up from 33.7 percent market share in the fourth quarter in 2011.
