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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