By Brad Anderson, Senior Vice President, Business Product Group
On December 3 market analyst firm IDC released its Q3 Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker report of industry revenue and server shipments. The report bears out what we know: that the challenging economy has had an effect on IT spending, including in server sales. In fact, IDC reports that worldwide server factory revenue declined in this period by 5.2 percent falling to $12.6 billion with an overall server shipment increase of 2.8 percent.
What’s behind these numbers is the fact that the global environment is causing CIOs to be more focused than ever on increasing IT productivity, simplifying their IT infrastructure and getting more value from their technology spend. This is what we are hearing from our customers and where we are focusing our energy to help them.
Our core strength is providing technology that’s powerful, reliable, flexible and cost effective. We are well positioned to respond to customer needs. The IDC report shows that we have increased our server shipments by 3 percent year-over-year and remain the second largest provider of servers in the world based on shipment volume.
Companies are investing in preparing their businesses for the future, and we’re helping customers do more with less. Michael Dell talked about the need for customers to make strategic investments even in these challenging economic conditions. IDC’s report shows that customers are doing just that.
A perfect example of this is with blade servers, which help reduce energy consumption and save valuable datacenter space. This segment is a bright spot in the IDC report. Industry-wide blade server shipments grew by almost 40 percent year-over-year. Dell out-paced the industry with 60 percent growth, the fastest growth of any top vendor.
Dell understands industry drivers and provides companies the IT-hardware they want and value they need. We shared a specific example yesterday, at the Gartner Datacenter conference, where we talked about how Dell is saving millions of dollars by getting the most about what we have in our datacenter. Our services organization is helping customers do the exact same thing by unleashing their “hidden datacenters.”
CIO Insight and CNET both wrote about how we are helping companies in the data center.
While we face challenging economic conditions, we are well-positioned to help our customer simplify IT, reducing costs and maximizing productivity with a strong enterprise portfolio of products and services.
Are you a large enterprise customer? I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you’re spending your IT dollars these days.