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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / SEPTEMBER 22, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 38
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Breaking News -
Platforms:
IDC Expects Return To Growth In
The U.S. Server Market
According to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Forecast, spending for
servers
is on the upswing in the United States. IDC expects the U.S. server market to
recover to $18.2 billion in 2003, or about 3 percent year-on-year growth over
2002.
This will be the first year since 2000 that spending in the U.S. server
market
has increased. Emerging markets in Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) and Central
and Eastern Europe are also expected to achieve positive growth over last
year. Worldwide, spending for servers is expected to be flat at $49 billion in
2003 with sluggish enterprise IT markets in Japan, Western Europe, and Latin
America conspiring to inhibit a broader worldwide recovery.
Leading the market recovery in the United States has been x86-based (Intel
and
AMD) servers running either Linux or Windows operating systems. In 2003, the
worldwide Linux server market is expected to grow 34 percent over the previous
year to $3.1 billion and the Windows server market is expected to grow 8
percent to $15.0 billion. Customer migration to these platforms to handle IT
infrastructure workloads, to meet server demand in small and medium
businesses, and in the technical and high performance computing market will
drive much of this growth.
"As the market finds its feet, demand has shifted to new classes of
products
and vendors are positioning themselves accordingly," said Mark Melenovsky,
director at IDC Server Research. "Customers are betting IT dollars on a number
of new platforms and architectures to prepare themselves to compete in a more
Web-enabled marketplace. Notable among these products are Linux and Microsoft
server platforms, x86 processor-based systems, and more modular computing
architectures in the form of rack-optimized servers and server blades."
Server blades are on the cusp of tremendous growth in the market. While
they
represented only about 3 percent of the server unit shipments in 2Q03 with
sales of 41,000 blades, IDC expects more than 2.2 million blades to ship
worldwide by 2007, or about 27 percent of all new servers sold.
In contrast to the Windows and Linux server market, the UNIX server market
has
declined more than $12 billion -- or about two fifths of its value -- between
2000 and 2002. "The hemorrhaging in the UNIX server market is largely behind
us," said Steve Josselyn, research director at Global Enterprise Server
Solutions. "While spending for UNIX-based servers is not expected to grow over
the course of the next five years, we expect enterprise customer demand to
sustain this market for the near term."
In a longer term view, IDC forecasts the worldwide server market will
achieve
a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 2.8 percent over the next five years,
representing a $56.6 billion opportunity in 2007. Driven by smaller form
factors and more incremental infrastructure capacity, server units are
expected to achieve a CAGR of 12.7 percent, reaching 8.1 million new server
sales in 2007.
IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Forecast is a quantitative tool for
analyzing
the future global server market on a quarterly basis. The forecast includes
quarterly shipments (both ISS and upgrades) and customer revenues segmented by
region, operating system, price band, CPU type, form factor and CPU
capacity.
For more product information, please contact Hoang Nguyen at (508)935-4718
or via e-mail at
hnguyen@idc.com.
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