Gurgaon/New Delhi, March 7, 2006 – Continuing the momentum gained in 2004, the India server market performed extremely well in 2005, according to IDC’s Asia/Pacific Quarterly Enterprise Server Tracker, Q4 2005, Feb 2006 release. Server shipments in 2005 totaled 96,762 units for an aggregate value of US$ 499.6 million. “2005 was an excellent year for x86 server sales, with total shipments growing 42% in comparison to 2004. Financial Services, IT Services, Government and Manufacturing segments were the major driving forces for market growth”, according to Dinender Sharma, Manager, Computing Products and Channels Research, IDC India.

The volume server market* was the key contributor to the overall market growth. Witnessing strong revenue increase, it grew at a blistering 42.2% on an annual basis.

*IDC segments the server market into three server classes: the volume server market (consisting of all systems with an average selling value [ASV] below US$ 25,000), the midrange enterprise server market (consisting of all systems with an ASV from US$ 25,000 to US$ 499,999), and the high-end enterprise server market (consisting of all systems with an ASV of US$ 500,000 and above).

x86 Industry Standard Server Market Dynamics

The x86 server market showed strong buoyancy. Public sector banks, PSEs and insurance companies, with a large number of branch offices across the country, were the perennial drivers of the x86 server demand. Furthermore, mid-sized businesses deployed collaborative, messaging, and lightweight ERP and other BP applications to fuel the demand.

“Windows Server spending reached very close to that of UNIX servers for the first time”, Dinender added. Customers are deploying more fully configured Windows servers in support of scalable enterprise workloads and server virtualisation projects.

Overall Server Market Standings, by Vendor

In terms of leading server vendors, IBM gained significant ground and emerged as the leader in terms of factory revenues, with 33.8 percent of server revenues. HP nabbed No. 2, with 32.7 percent share.

When looking at the x86 server market in terms of factory revenues, IBM remained at the top with a share of 34.2 per cent. However, on the basis of unit shipments, HP was the leader in this segment. In the non-x86 category, HP again cornered the highest market share in terms of factory revenues.

HP emerged as the leading vendor for servers running on the UNIX platform. The vendor totalled 22.2% of shipments in terms of units and 34.6% of the UNIX server market in terms of factory revenues.

“Strong economic growth outlook for the 2006 time frame will be one of the key underpinnings of healthy IT infrastructure investments, including those in servers in the short- to mid-term. Advances in 64-bit, dual-core, and virtualisation technologies will further fuel growth in the enterprise computing and server market”, Mr. Sharma forecasted. The server market in India is expected to cross the 100,000-unit shipments mark in 2006 for first time ever. The milestone will enable India to supersede Australia as the second largest server market in APEJ in unit shipment terms.