By Paul Kunert • Get more from this author
Oracle’s standing in the EMEA server space took another battering during Q1 as sales collapsed in a market that posted double-digit growth, underpinned by high-end and mid-range shipments supporting virtualisation and cloud deployments.
The US behemoth saw revenues plummet by almost 20 per cent to $241m, pushing down its market share from 9.5 per cent a year ago to 6.9 per cent, while the total market climbed 10.8 per cent to $3,5bn.
Nathaniel Martinez, IDC research director in the Enterprise Server Group, said Oracle accounted for more than 70 per cent of overall RISC Unix sales but bore the brunt of the weakened segment.
“The whole RISC and UNIX market remains in the doldrums with customers continuing to adopt a wait and see attitude [as they assess recent tech advances on x86, at chip and systems level, designed to boost reliability, availability and security],” he told El Reg.
In contrast, x86 machines were again the major growth engine, accounting for 66.6 per cent of the market or £2.3bn; it is now the 17th consecutive quarter that the platform has outstripped enterprise boxes running CISC RISC EPIC processors.
Martinez said server sales were being driven by the ongoing transformation of the data centre as medium and large organisations look to gain efficiencies through virtualisation, automation and cloud strategies.
Market giants HP, IBM and Dell were on their uppers in the quarter, bagging total market growth of 10 per cent, 33 per cent and 10 per cent respectively. ®
This article originally appeared in The Register.