19 November 2007
by Paul Kunert
The impact of consolidation and virtualisation on the growth of x86 sales has yet to be felt acutely as enterprises moved to quad core systems more quickly than expected last quarter, helping to keep the market buoyant.
Earlier this year, IDC forecast a slowdown in the growth of unit shipments and a rise in average sales prices to 2011, with companies looking to consolidate server estates and embrace virtualisation (MicroScope, 16 April).
But demand for multi-core processing, which offers the performance to allow customers to pursue these strategies, "brought forward replacement cycles", said Nathaniel Martinez, IDC programme manager for European systems and infrastructure solutions.
"We thought the ramp of quad core would not be as concentrated — even the chip and server vendors have been surprised by this," he said, adding that 50 per cent of Dell’s x86 sales were based on quad core processors last quarter.
According to preliminary data by IDC, EMEA shipments grew 12.7 per cent during the third quarter — beating its earlier estimates of 8 per cent — with more than 595,000 x86 systems sold.
There may be a long-term risk to server sales as customers consolidate their server estates, said John Joslin, managing director of Computacenter, "but many of these projects are kicking off now, which creates a hardware and services opportunity".
Quad core systems had encouraged IT directors to dip into the budget earlier than planned, said HP’s Pete Murray, director of enterprise servers and storage, which may have delayed the inevitable impact of consolidation.
"If there is an impact on overall growth, we will take the Adaptive Infrastructure message to the wider customer base," he said, adding that the SME market was a key growth area for vendors.
