TechNavio: Server Spending Falls

LONDON -- There is overwhelming evidence that spending on servers is slowing down significantly across a number of market sectors in some cases by up to a factor of five, according to research conducted by TechNavio from Infiniti Research.

Using TechNavio - a comprehensive research solution that addresses the spectrum of intelligence needs of IT industry Sales and Strategic Planning teams - Infiniti has identified the trend as the direct result of virtualization deployment and the drive to greener computing. The findings have been released to time with Storage Expo, being held at Olympia on 17th October.

Rahul Agarwal, co-founder of Infiniti Research and head of business development for TechNavio, stated: "According to research in 2006 data centers worldwide housed about 29 million servers, having grown at 15% a year since 2000. By units, server shipments grew 5.9% in 2006 according to IDC, but our analysis of current server shipments and virtualization adoption levels suggests that this growth is going to slow to only 2% in 2008. By 2009 it will actually go into a sustained decline to reach about 24.5 million by 2014,"

"Our view is that to offset this volume pressure, hardware vendors will be forced to improve unit margins by building in virtualization capability, memory and I/O interfaces in the hardware. Our research also appears to indicate that some vendors may push thin client sales as desktop virtualization proliferates," he continued.

Infiniti Research Ltd.