IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker reports the WW server market's revenue grows by 12.1% Y-o-Y in Q1 2011-- reaching totals of $11.9Bn.
Server unit shipments also see growth in Q1, increasing by 2.5% Y-o-Y to 1.9m units, which IDC says is "the second highest quarterly total ever in the first calendar quarter of any year".
All 3 server classes (volume, midrange enterprise, and high-end enterprise) see positive Y-o-Y growth-- volume systems grow by 8.7% , the midrange enterprise segment grows by a sharp 28.3% while high end enterprise's revenues increase by 14.2%-- the first time in 8 quarters all 3 segments experience Y-o-Y revenue growth in the same quarter, according to IDC.
HP holds the position of top WW vendor, taking over 31.5% revenue share for Q1 2011 and seeing 10.8% growth (thanks to improving demand for x86-based ProLiant servers and Itanium-based Integrity servers).
IBM is at no. 2, with 29.2% market share and 22.1% Y-o-Y growth. The company's Power Systems see "significant improvement", while demand is still strong for System z servers and x86-based System x servers.
Dell remains at 3rd place, with 15.6% market share and 9.7% Y-o-Y growth through strong demand from SMB customers.
At no 4 is Oracle (celebrating its first anniversary of its Sun Microsystems acquisition) and Fujitsu.
IDC reports a growing market for non-86 servers (including servers based on RISC, EPIC (Itanium-based) and CISC processors), with 12.3% Y-o-Y growth to reach $4Bn in Q1 2011. Driving such growth is improving demand for Unix servers (growing by 12.5% Y-o-Y) and IBM System z platforms (with 41.1% Y-o-Y growth).
Linux and Microsoft Windows servers are also showing strong demand and growth.
Meanwhile the blade market sees 23.8% Y-o-Y growth in Q1 2011. Nearly 90% of blade server revenue comes from x86-based blades, with HP taking the no. 1 vendor position (50% market share), followed by IBM (20.2% market share).