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.