Australian server market powers past $1 billion mark

The amount spent on servers in Australia during 2007 broke through the $US1 billion dollar mark to $US1.001 billion, according to IDC. The 17 per cent increase in Australia's server spending was the strongest annual growth since 1996.

Overall server spending registered strong growth despite the sluggish two per cent growth in units underpinned by a spectacular 30.2 per cent increase in high-end enterprise ($US500K+) server spending.

Although spending on high-end enterprise servers grew the fastest in 2007, the increase in spending on midrange enterprise and volume servers was equally healthy. The stellar demand for high-end enterprise servers was fuelled by customers from across vertical segments that included telecoms, finance, government, and retail.

"Virtualisation helped boost server revenue numbers in 2007 with richer configurations of servers being deployed to drive space, utilisation, and energy efficiency," said Matthew Oostveen, research manager of Asia/Pacific enterprise servers and workstations research at IDC. "Virtualisation was also one of the key underpinnings for the 40 per cent increase in x86 blade server shipments in 2007."

IDC's survey results showed that Hewlett-Packard was the number one server vendor in Australia in terms of units shipped in 2007, followed by Dell. In terms of vendor revenue, IBM was the market leader in the Australian server market.

In the Asia/Pacific (ex. Japan) region, Australia ranked as the third largest market for servers in terms of spending, behind the China and Korea.

Len Rust is publisher of The Rust Report.