Server sales cratered in Q4, says IDC
Someone has turned the volume knob on the x64 server market from 11 down to 9. And that someone is the economic meltdown.
In the fourth quarter of 2008, when the meltdown was flaring up, server spending dropped off dramatically. The analysts at IDC who track the server space reckon that server sales contracted "sharply" in Q4, falling 14 per cent to $13.5bn, with shipments dropping by 12 per cent.
Those declines might not be as severe as the ones we have all seen in our retirement funds in recent months, but for the tectonically moving server space, where change comes in small increments, this is akin to an earthquake like we haven't seen since the dot-com bust. And it looks like it can - and likely will - get worse.
"The server market experienced its sharpest decline since the middle of the dot-com slowdown nearly seven years ago," confirmed said Matthew Eastwood, group vice president of IDC's enterprise platforms group, which puts together the server stats each quarter.
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