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UK sysadmins pry open wallets for servers ... but not for long

Expect purses to snap shut in Q2, says analyst

IDC reckons the UK server space staged a slight recovery in Q1 with spending and unit shipments rising by low single digits, but has warned that preliminary results suggest that Q2 will look weaker.

Some 82,000 servers were sold in the UK in the opening three months of the year, up 1.4 per cent on the same period a year ago, equating to $545m in factory revenues, which itself is a climb of 3.5 per cent.

Giorgio Nebuloni, senior research analyst at IDC, told The Channel the UK was driven by the HPC segment in higher education and by hosting and cloud providers that were either updating or expanding their data centres.

"The UK market is doing relatively fine because there were a few large projects on the public sector side that kept things going. There wasn't major spending growth in SME or corporate but no significant contraction either," said Nebuloni.

x86 shipments – which make up 96 per cent of the UK market – were up 2 per cent and revenues were up by the same amount, IDC said.

Density-optimised server shipments and revenues were up 6 and 20 per cent respectively; tower unit sales grew 6 per cent but revenues dropped 11 per cent; while rack unit growth was 5 per cent – though the value was flat. Blade shipments dropped 1 per cent but rose 1 per cent in revenues.

Market leader HP was down double digits in units and turnover; Dell did well in the HPC space to grow unit sales by more than 20 per cent and revenues 10 per cent; and IBM leaped more than 20 per cent on both fronts.

There was no let-up in the pressure on Oracle, with shipments and revenues both down by low single digits. ®

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