Server Market Grew 9% in 1Q11, Revenues Jump

It seems that the first quarter of the ongoing year proved to be quite lucrative for the server industry, as there was a significant upwards evolution in terms of sales and finances, though not exactly equal.

With all the new connected electronics getting released and sold, the strain on the existing web infrastructure has been steadily growing.

As such, the need for more and better servers seems more pressing that usual, this apparently having been reflected in the progression of the overall industry during the first three months of this year.

More specifically, analysts have discovered that the server segment saw a shipment growth of roughly 9%, enabling revenues to grow by 17.3% compared to the same period of 2010.

Eastern Europe was the star of the show (21.1% and 36% shipment and revenue increases, respectively), while HP led the worldwide charge as far as individual companies go (it made over $3.8 billion revenue).

"x86 servers forged ahead and grew 8.6 percent in units for the year and 17.5 percent in revenue. Following earlier trends, the x86-based server market provided an increase in average selling prices that pushed revenue higher than shipments, and this was the case in the first quarter for all regions," said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner.

"RISC/Itanium Unix servers finally exited their slump and grew 5.2 percent in shipments and 20.7 percent in vendor revenue, compared with the same quarter last year. The "other" CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, showed a growth in vendor revenue of 19.6 percent."

Now that the new generation of Itanium platform might be delayed, some changes in market share may arise, but it is more or less clear that sales will either continue to rise or keep strong.

After all, the number of web-connected PCs and consumer electronics isn't bound to stop growing, let alone start falling, any time soon.