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The server market
in Western Europe continues to weaken, according to new
market research released by the Gartner
Dataquest market-research firm, with economic concerns causing many
corporations to put off large server purchases for the near future.
Server shipments in Western
Europe fell by 7 percent in Q3 2001 when compared to Q3 2000, falling
to 248,000 units, while server revenues declined to $3.26 billion — a decline
of 21 percent in Q3 2001
when compared to Q3 2000.
The server market
in Western Europe continues to weaken, according to new
market research released by the Gartner
Dataquest market-research firm, with economic concerns causing many
corporations to put off large server purchases for the near future.
“Concerns over the economic outlook in Europe continue to negatively
impact investments in hardware Revenues were further dampened by intense pricing
competition at all levels of the product spectrum,” said Karen Benson,
principal analyst at Gartner Dataquest, in a press release. “User
purchasing patterns changed as they switched to maintaining their installed
infrastructure rather than undertaking major new application deployment. This
resulted in an increased tendency towards investment in upgrades and towards
low-end systems.”
The weakest segment of the Western European server economy was RISC/UNIX
servers, which typically used as enterprise servers. RISC/UNIX server shipments
were down by 36 percent over the previous year, while revenues were down 33
percent from the previous year. Gartner Dataquest attributed this drop to slower
spending in the telecommunications and finance fields, which have traditionally
been big buyers of RISC/UNIX systems.
Therefore, it’s no surprise that vendors specializing in RISC/UNIX systems
are suffering in Western Europe: Sun, for instance, suffered a 48 percent drop
in shipments in Q3 2001 compared to Q3 2000. Companies that offer low-end
Intel-based servers fared comparatively better: Compaq, the leading server
vendor in Western Europe, saw its shipments decline only 5 percent from 2000 to
2001, while Dell saw a 25 percent increase in shipments from Q3 2000 to Q3 2001.
In terms of specific countries, server spending declined 15 percent in
Germany, 17 percent in France and 42 percent in Great Britain from the previous
year.
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