HP Dominates Regional Server Biz
N
N
0Overall Score

According to IDC Asia Pacific results for server and storage marketshares for the region HP tops the list, but in Australia the company slips in one or two categories.

It always rings alarm bells in an Aussie journo’s mind when a company starts trumpeting marketshare figures for the entire Asia Pacific region rather than Australian figures. But according to IDC Australia Senior Analyst for Servers and Workstations Margaret Banaghan, all IDC’s server shares are calculated at the regional level.
She took the trouble to check the last quarter figures for Australian shares and revealed that while HP Australia is generally fairing pretty well on a regional level, the local business needs to pick up its game in one or two areas.

The figures released by HP’s PR agency outlined how according to IDC’s Asia/Pacific Quarterly Enterprise Server Tracker, in first Quarter 2005 (sure it’s a little late, but HP PR has been awfully quiet since Carly left) the company has maintained a leadership position in the overall server and storage market in Asia Pacific (including Japan).

In revenue terms the company held the number one spot in Unix servers, Linux servers, Windows servers, Itanium (naturally) and the x86 server market segments. The company also held the top spot for disk storage market according to IDC’s APJ Disk Storage Market Performance Summary.

Looking at the Australia only figures, Banaghan told SmartOffice News that Hewlett Packard owns the top spot in Windows and x86 slices. It also owns the Itanium market since it is about the only company offering product.

But when it comes to the Unix market, Sun leads the local competition and the Linux server market is lead by IBM.

In Disk Storage the company also rates second behind disk powerhouse EMC.

All the same, the company also had a ripper quarter with highlights such as x86-blade server units up 118.6 per cent year-on-year.
Beating out Sun in the region with a 29.8 per cent Unix revenue doesn’t leave Sun with much of a comeback and the company’s ProLiant servers have now led the AP market for 12 consecutive quarters. In fact it extended it lead in first Quarter on a year-on-year basis with a 26.5 percent unit shipment and a 28.4 per cent revenue share.
From an OS point of view getting 29.3 per cent share of Windows and 25.7 per cent share of the Linux server market is a good result for a company in the throes of a CEO execution. Carly Fiorina was sacked as CEO around the middle of February. Perhaps the company competition took it easy for the rest of te quarter thinking HP would lose its way.

How’d they do it? “HP’s success in the server and storage markets is the result of good execution of their enterprise infrastructure strategy, which goes beyond hardware to include infrastructure solution capabilities,” says Avneesh Saxena, Vice President, Computing Systems, IDC Asia/Pacific. “Users today are looking to buy solutions, rather then mere boxes, that help them improve an existing business process and reduce the cost of IT.”