The International Data Corporation’s (IDC) released their  Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker today covering Q4 2011.  Despite a 7.2% decrease in the worldwide server factory revenue, the blade market continued to experience growth in 4Q11 with factory revenue increasing 8.3% year over year.   Other key facts from the IDC press release:

• Bladed servers (including x86, EPIC, and RISC blades) accounted for $2.3 billion in revenues, or 16.1% of quarterly server market revenue.
• 89.6% of all blade revenue is driven by x86-based blades, which now represent 22.5% of all x86 server revenue.

HP maintained the number 1 spot in the server blade market in 4Q11 with 47.4% revenue share – down from 51% in 3Q11, while IBM grew from 18.2% in 3Q11 to 21.5% revenue share in 4Q11. Cisco and Dell rounded out the top 4 blade server vendors with 11.0% and 8.7% factory revenue share, gaining 5.3 and 1.3 points of blade market share, respectively from Q311.

According to Jed Scaramella, research manager, Enterprise Servers at IDC, “While there was softness in other segments, blades remained a strong point and continued as a driver of growth for the server market. The blade server category achieved both its highest reported revenue and revenue share in the fourth quarter of 2011.  IDC believes blades are a key element in a server vendor’s portfolio as they are a strategic footprint in the datacenter and important for vendor revenue and profitability. A converged blade platform is an opportunity for additional pull-through revenue beyond the server, including storage, networking, software, and services.”

For the full IDC report covering the Q4 2011 Worldwide Server Market, please visit IDC’s website at:
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23347812

Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com.  He has over 15 years of experience in the x86 server marketplace.  Since 1997 Kevin has worked at several resellers in the Atlanta area, and has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware and Citrix virtualization.    Kevin works for Dell as a Server Specialist covering the Global 500 East market.

Hot off the presses is the latest IDC worldwide server market revenue report for Q3 2011. The gist of the report is that while some of the numbers are slightly adjusted, really not much has changed in the blade server market.

Revenue growth for the entire server market (all servers, not just blade servers) slowed considerably showing only 4.2% year over year growth bringing in $12.7 billion. Growth in the world of servers continues but this marks the slowest growth rate for any quarter since Q1 2010. IDC believes that overall server sales will continue to decelerate due to weakening economic conditions around the globe. “After nearly two years of steady revenue growth, the server market began to decelerate in Q3 2011 as demand stabilized for many system categories,” said Matt Eastwood, group VP and general manager. Incidentally, IBM and HP are both holding steady, tied for the #1 spot in revenue share, at 29.8%.

When looking at the blade server market specifically, growth was steady for Q3 2011 but not as explosive as Q2 2011. IDC reports “solid growth” in the quarter with a revenue increase of 16.4% year over year (vs 26.9% growth in 2Q11). Shipments increased 2.4% (vs 6.2% reported growth for 2Q11). One thing that hasn’t changed since last quarter is that 89% of all blade revenue is driven by x86 systems. Also, blade server sales representing  20.8% of all x86 server revenue. This shows continued steady growth for the blade server segment but that the pace may be slowing slightly.

#1 market share: HP managed to hold the majority margin moving to 51.0% in Q3 2011 from 51.9% in Q2 2011.

#2 market share: IBM continues to see its margin chipped away slightly down to 18.5% in Q3 2011 from 19.1% in Q2 2011.

#3 market share: Cisco’s disruptive market penetration seems to have slowed at 10.7% overall compared to a solid 10% in Q2 2011.

#4 market share: Even Dell dropped slightly to 7.2% revenue share from 8.2% last quarter.

In looking at the totals, the top four vendors represented 87.4% of the revenue share in the blade servers market which is actually down 2% from last quarter. Cisco grew revenue share by less than 1% which means that some of the displacement of the remaining top vendors is not accounted for. Does this mean there may be some new players in the “others” category that we should be watching? Without a detailed breakdown it’s hard to tell but I’ll definitely be looking forward to comparing the numbers next quarter to see if the trend continues. It could, after all, just be a factor of the margin of error in the statistics.

According to Jed Scaramella, research manager, Enterprise Servers at IDC, “Blade systems represented the fastest growing segment in the server industry and now account for 16.0% of total server revenue – a historic high.”

Probably the most interesting aspect of the report is the introduction of hyper-scale servers. “Hyper-scale servers are designed for large scale datacenters with streamlined system designs that focus on performance, energy efficiency, and density.” This sounds like the mantra for blade servers with the main difference being the lack of management and high availability capabilities at the hardware level. Basically these represent the miles of simple, rack mount commodity servers used by the likes of Google and Facebook. This is a $428 million dollar server segment and growing.

For the full IDC report covering the Q2 2011 Worldwide Server Market, please visit IDC’s website at http://www.idc.com.

IDC came out with their 2Q 2011 worldwide server market revenue report on Aug. 23, 2011 which shows that IBM may be poised to take over the #1 spot within the next few quarters.

According to IDC, worldwide server sales (all servers, not just blade servers) for Q2 2011 factory revenues increased 17.9 % year over year to $13.2 billion in the 2nd quarter of 2011 (2Q11). Interestingly, this marks a 2.7% greater percentage of sales but $2 billion less revenue than the last time we reported IDC numbers for Q4 2010. They also reported the blade server market continued to accelerate with growth exploding in the quarter to a revenue increase of 26.9% year over year (vs 12.6% growth in 4Q10). Shipments increased 6.2% (vs .4% reported growth for 4Q10). According to IDC, nearly 89% of all blade revenue is driven by x86 systems which is an increase of 5% since 4Q10. Blades now represent 21.2% of all x86 server revenue. This shows continued steady growth for the blade server segment and a strong future for x86 systems.

Probably the most interesting aspect of the report is that HP and IBM now share the #1 spot in the overall server market. IBM earned 30.5% of revenue share while HP drew in 29.8%. With regard to the blades market specifically it is a completely different story:

#1 market share: HP continued to lose their dominance dropping from 53.4% in Q4 2010 to 51.9% in Q2 2011.

#2 market share: IBM total revenue share dropped drastically from 28.1% in Q4 2010 to 19.1% in Q2 2011.

#3 market share: Cisco continues the long climb reaching 10% revenue share surpassing Dell’s 8.2%.

According to Jed Scaramella, research manager, Enterprise Servers at IDC, “Blade revenue growth accelerated in the second quarter and remained the fastest growing form factor. All major vendors experienced double-digit growth in their blade business.”

The trend is pretty clear in showing that while the percentages for the top spots continue to shift, the market is still growing strongly and there seems to be plenty of room for all the top players.

For the full IDC report covering the Q2 2011 Worldwide Server Market, please visit IDC’s website at http://www.idc.com.

May 24, 2011  - IDC came out with their 1Q 2011 worldwide server market revenue report today showing that Cisco has finally entered the market standings with a 3rd place standing at 9.4% factory revenue share .  IDC’s findings also showed that both HP and IBM decreased their blade server market share from Q4 2010.

According to IDC, worldwide server sales (all servers, not just blade servers) for 1Q 2011 increased 12.1 % year over year to $11.9 billion in factory revenues. IDC also reported the blade server market accelerated and continued its strong growth in 1Q with revenue increasing 23.8% year over year with shipments increasing to 5.4% compared to 1Q 2010.  Overall, blade servers represent 15.2% of the quarterly worldwide server revenues.  Interestingly enough, 90% of all blade revenue is driven by x86 systems, a segment in which blades now represent 20.5% of all x86 server revenue.

Here’s a summary of the top 4 blade server market share (based on factory revenue share):

#1 market share: HP decreased their market share from 53.4% in Q4 2010 to 50.0% in Q1 2011

#2 market share: IBM decreased their market share from 28.1% in Q4 2010 to 20.2% in Q1 2011.

#3 market share: Cisco at 9.4% in Q1 2011

#4 market share: Dell at 8.2% in Q1 2011

HP maintains the #1 market share spot now holding an impressive 50% of all blade server factory revenue market share.  An interesting observation, though, is that both HP and IBM have fallen over the past 12 months when compared to Q1 2010.  As you can see in the chart, HP dropped 6.2% market share and IBM fell 3.4% market share year-over-year.  Is this contributed to Cisco’s entry into the market place? 

According to Jed Scaramella, research manager, Enterprise Servers at IDC, “After several years of being a highly consolidated market where the top 3 vendor accounted for over 80% of blade revenue, the recent entry of Cisco has introduced a viable new competitor to the market.”  While the quantities of Cisco UCS customers were not mentioned into the IDC report, according to Cisco’s Omar Sultan’s blog (http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/they-were-wrong-about-ucs-what-else-are-they-wrong-about/) , there are 3,820 customers as of Cisco’s 2nd Fiscal Quarter 2011.

For a full summary of the IDC Quarterly Server Tracker report, visit my other blog at:
http://corus360.com/company/blog/idc-shows-hp-as-the-server-leader-for-q1-2011

IDC came out with their 4Q 2010 worldwide server market revenue report on Feb. 28, 2011 which shows that IBM continued to grow from Q3 2010 in their blade market share while HP dropped in market share.

According to IDC, worldwide server sales (all servers, not just blade servers) for Q4 2010 factory revenues increased 15.3 % year over year to $15 billion in the 4th quarter of 2010 (4Q10). They also reported the blade server market accelerated and continued its sharp growth in the quarter with revenue increasing 12.6% year over yearwith shipments increasing only .4% compared to 4Q09. According to IDC, nearly 85% of all blade revenue is driven by x86 systems, a segment in which blades now represent 19.2% of all x86 server revenue.

While the press release did not provide details of the market share for all of the top 5 blade vendors, they did provide data for the following:

#1 market share: HP decreased their market share from 54.1% in Q3 2010 to 53.4% in Q4 2010

#2 market share: IBM increased their market share from 26.8% in Q3 2010 to 28.1% in Q4 2010.

According to Jed Scaramella, research manager, Enterprise Servers at IDC, “ Blade systems represent a strategic element of server portfolios, as vendor utilize the platform as the foundation for converged solutions.  Additionally vendors continue to expand their blade offerings to support more workloads, including extreme virtualized environments, scale-out deployments, and higher-end workloads.”.”

For the full IDC report covering the Q4 2010 Worldwide Server Market, please visit IDC’s website at http://www.idc.com.

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I was updating a slide deck that I use to compare blade server technologies for customers when I came across the IDC and Gartner data from Q3 of 2009.  I was very surprised at what I found out, so today’s post takes a look back at 2009 and compares it to 2010.

I have tried to update my readers of the market share reports that IDC posts each quarter and over the past few quarters I commented about HP’s blade server market share decreasing, however when you take a step back and look at Q3 2009, you’ll see that HP’s market share was 50.7%, IBM’s market share was 29.4% and the overall percentage of blade servers in the x86 market place was 13.6%.

In comparison, when you take a look at Q3 2010, HP’s market share increased to 54.1% while IBM’s market share lowered to 26.8%.  In a year’s time, the overall server marketplace showed a huge increase in blade servers to 18.9%!

I also came across the first Gartner Magic Quadrant for blade servers, so I decided to put them side-by-side to see how they quadrant changed from October of 2009 to January of 2011.

However, that didn’t help much, so I decided to overlay the two chart (below), which showed some interesting things. 
1) HP barely moved
2) IBM moved up and to the right
3) Dell moved to the right, but dropped down
4) Cisco moved up and to the right

That is the end of what I wanted to say.  Didn’t really want to analyze too much, as the images speak for themselves.  I’d love to hear what your thoughts are – feel free to comment below.

As I’m anxiously awaiting the Q4 2010 IDC blade server market share results from IDC (due out around the week of Feb 28, 2011), I figured I’d take a risk and see if I can trend what the results may be.  Here’s what I found.

Disclaimer – this post is purely speculation and is not based on any future information that IDC may provide.  This speculation is solely provided for entertainment and should not be used in any other manner than that.

Before I attempted to trend out what Q4 would look like, I had to review what I found in Q1 – Q3 of 2010:

Next, I chose to add a Linear Forecast Trendline using Microsoft Excel.  Here’s what I came up with:

I have to admit, I don’t have any experience “trending” data, so I’m relying on Microsoft to point me in the right direction, however based on that information, I predict the following Q4 2010 worldwide blade server market share results:

HP: ~53% market share
IBM: ~28% market share
Others (Dell, Fujitsu, etc.): ~19%

Those are my predictions – what are yours?

IDC came out with their 3Q 2010 worldwide server market revenue report last month which shows that IBM grew from Q2 2010 in their blade market share.

According to IDC, worldwide server sales (all servers, not just blade servers) for Q3 2010 factory revenues increased 13.2 % year over year to $11.8 billion in the 3rd quarter of 2010 (3Q10). They also reported the blade server market accelerated and continued its sharp growth in the quarter with factory revenue increasing 23.1% year over year with shipments increasing 5.5% compared to 3Q09.  According to IDC, nearly 88% of all blade revenue is driven by x86 systems, a segment in which blades now represent 18.9% of all x86 server revenue.

While the press release did not provide details of the market share for all of the top 5 blade vendors, they did provide data for the following:

#1 market share: HP decreased their market share from 55.8% in Q2 2010 to 54.1% in Q3 2010

#2 market share: IBM increased their market share from 24.2% in Q2 2010 to 26.8% in Q3 2010.

According to Jed Scaramella, research manager, Enterprise Servers at IDC, “Blade systems represent a strategic element of server portfolios, as vendor utilize the platform as the foundation for converged solutions.  Additionally vendors continue to expand their blade offerings to support more workloads, including extreme virtualized environments, scale-out deployments, and higher-end workloads.”

For the full IDC report covering the Q3 2010 Worldwide Server Market, please visit IDC’s website at http://www.idc.com/about/press.jsp.

I recently received a comment  on my previous post concerning Cisco’s market share (“What’s the Truth About Cisco’s Market Share“) which has me more confused.  The comment admits that Cisco has not released any market share data to IDC, but that when you look at the Cisco Q1 2010 Earnings Call and compare it to IDC’s findings of the overall industry you should be able to derive conclusions from there.  That’s where it gets confusing.

First look at IDC.  As I reported in May (“IDC Q1 2010 Report: Blade Servers Growing, With #1 Market Share Going To…“), IDC reported that Q1 2010 revenue for all blade servers,  including x86, EPIC, and RISC blades, accounted for $1.4 billion in revenues.

Next, we review the Call Transcript from the Cisco Q1 2010 Earnings Call (http://www.morningstar.com/earnings/19007502-cisco-systems-inc-csco-q1-2011.aspx?pindex=4) and we see that Cisco reports, “Our UCS server product family had another extremely strong quarter with growth year-over-year of 550% to an annualized run rate of almost $500 million.”

So, IDC reports there were $1.4 billion blade servers sold worldwide in Q1 2010 and Cisco reports they had a Year-over-Year growth of 550% to an annualized run rate of $500 million. 

Since we don’t know how 2010 is going to end up, we would need to do some estimation to play out this scenario.  We could estimate that all blade servers sales in 2010 will equal close to $5.6 billion ($1.4 x 4 quarters).  If so, in order to figure out what percentage Cisco would own, we would have to add their $500 million to the $5.6 billion estimated, so the adjusted 2010 blade server revenue would be $6.1 billlion.  If Cisco’s annual blade (UCS) share was $500 million, that would mean Cisco owned 12.2% of the overall revenue share.  Based on the Q1 numbers that IDC reported, if HP had 56.2% share and IBM had 23.6%, that leaves 20.2% to divide up between Dell, Cisco, Fujitsu, Oracle and all other blade server vendors.  Could Cisco own the #3 revenue spot with 12.2% revenue share?  Possibly, but that would leave Dell to have less than 8% market share. 

All of this speculation is based on the Q1 2010 Cisco statement that they have an annualized run rate of $500 million in UCS.  If we look at comments left on my post about the Q2 2010 IDC numbers (“REVISED HP Loses Blade Market Share in Q2“) we find a comment from Jed Scaramella, research manager, Enterprise Servers at IDC who comments that “Dell owns 11.8% unit share in x86 blades.”  Let’s revise my math based on what IDC reports for Q2 2010:

Dell: 11.8% market share
IBM: 24.2% market share
HP: 55.8% market share

Total IDC reported market share for Q2 2010: 91.8% which leaves 8.2% market share for Cisco and all others.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m NOT saying that Cisco is misreporting their UCS numbers, but the numbers don’t appear to line up.  Perhaps Cisco is including their C-Series rack server line.  Perhaps the difference lies in the fact that Cisco is using year-over-year data and I’m using projected 2010 revenue numbers from IDC.  I just don’t know.  I’m confused and hope that Cisco and IDC can figure out something, because I’d REALLY like to know where Cisco stands in the market compared to HP, IBM and Dell. Знакомства

Cisco, your move.

Revised 9/29/2010 – I previously titled this blog post, “HP Loses Blade Server Market Share to IBM…” however I have since re-thought that statement. The report from IDC does not specify where HP’s blade server market share went from Q1 2010 – it only provides Q2 2010 market share numbers. I regret any confusion I may have caused.

Original post:

IDC came out with their 2Q 2010 worldwide server market revenue report last month which shows that HP lost blade server market share to IBM.

According to IDC, worldwide server sales (all servers, not just blade servers) for Q2 2010 factory revenues increased 11 % year over year to $10.9 billion in the 2nd quarter of 2010 (1Q10). They also reported the blade server market accelerated and continued its sharp growth in the quarter with factory revenue increasing 30.9% year over year, with shipment growth increasing by 13.6 compared to 2Q09. According to IDC, nearly 80% of all blade revenue is driven by x86 systems, a segment in which blades now represent 18.9% of all x86 server revenue.

While the press release did not provide details of the market share for all of the top 5 blade vendors, they did provide data for the following:

#1 market share: HP decreased their market share from 56.20% in Q1 2010 to 55.8% in Q2 2010

#2 market share: IBM increased their market share from 23.6% in Q1 2010 to 24.2% in Q2 2010.

The remaining 20% of market share was not mentioned, but I imagine they are split between Dell and Cisco.

According to Jed Scaramella, research manager, Enterprise Servers at IDC, “Blade adoption continued to gain momentum in the second quarter of 2010, as blades accounted for its largest portion of total server revenue since the form-factor came to market. Vendors continue to build out their blade offerings through enhanced virtualization, management, and I/O capabilities; customers are leveraging these technologies as part of converged systems that are a building block to future internal cloud infrastructures.”

For the full IDC report covering the Q2 2010 Worldwide Server Market, please click here.