Worldwide spending on servers will grow 5 per cent year-on-year in 2004 to touch $53 billion helped by replacements, according to a report by tech research firm IDC.
"A good environment for hardware and software replacement and migration is helping fuel enterprise spending for IT infrastructure. We anticipate growing demand in emerging markets like Eastern Europe and Asia as well as mature markets like the United States and Western Europe," said Steve Josselyn, research director for IDC's Global Enterprise Server Solutions programme.
IDC expects the strongest growth for the next five years to be in Central and Eastern Europe and Asia-Pacific region with the compound annual growth rate in excess of 6.5 per cent.
The report says that in the years to come the demand for servers will not be as high as in 2004. Between 2003-08 the worldwide server market would grow at CAGR of 3.8 per cent to touch $60.8 billion.
IDC said while vendors continue to compete very aggressively on price, demand has driven the number of servers sold above 20 per cent year-on-year growth for the past three quarters.
"There continues to be very strong growth in the x86 industry standards server market - particularly for Windows and Linux-based solutions," Mark Melenovsky, director of Global Enterprise Server Solutions research said in a statement.
In terms of products a key growth area will be the blade server market, which is expected to reach $9 billion by 2008.
Servers based on the Linux operating system will have a share of 29 per cent in total unit shipments in 2008 and revenues of $9.7 billion, the IDC study said.
The Windows-based servers are expected to capture 60 per cent of the all server unit shipments in 2008 and represent the largest server-operating environment in terms of revenues with $22.7 billion.
IDC anticipates that Windows and Linux servers combined will corner more than 50 per cent of the server market revenues in 2008, up from just 37 per cent in 2003.
© 2026