niceguy767 - You asked What the heck is Dell going to offer as meaningful competition to Opteron???
I suppose they'll keep offering the processors that have been gaining them market share in all x86 server markets.
Dell gains in servers at HP's expense
By Stephen Shankland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
April 26, 2002, 1:25 PM PT
news.com.com
Hewlett-Packard and Compaq Computer have said that their proposed merger will strengthen both outfits, but for now the two are losing ground to Dell Computer in key markets.
In the United States, HP saw its unit shipments of Intel-based servers shrink by 10 percent, according to one study, while another study showed that both companies lost ground in the PC market in Europe. Conversely, Dell grew in both markets.
In unit shipments of Intel-based servers in the United States, Compaq remains the top dog, with 242,000 systems sold in the quarter and 22.8 percent of the 1.1 billion total, according to preliminary figures released Friday by market researcher Gartner. But while Compaq's share barely budged from the same quarter last year, second-place Dell grew the fastest, increasing from 15.7 percent to 17.8 percent of the market.
HP, though, continues to have trouble, dropping from 10 percent in the first quarter of 2001 to 8.6 percent in the first quarter of 2002 worldwide. The company introduced a flock of new Intel servers, but HP's presence in the market has been eroding. Indeed, Intel servers are one of the driving reasons behind uniting with Compaq and, if and when the merger goes through, a Compaq exec will head up the group, the companies have said. "HP has been losing momentum and money in our (Intel server) business. Our efforts here need to be beefed up quickly," HP Chief Executive Carly Fiorina said in February.
Though unit shipments for the industry as a whole were essentially flat from the first quarter of 2001 to the first quarter of 2002, revenue from server sales in general has been shrinking, hurt by excessive sales during the years of Internet exuberance and the recession.
"Spending on servers is still slow," Gartner said in a report on the new figures. The analyst firm "expects the server market to show signs of recovery at least two quarters after the initial improvement in the general economy. This is especially true for the high-end servers."
Intel servers accounted for 90 percent of overall server shipments, Gartner said, but for a proportionally smaller fraction of the money spent. Higher-end Unix and mainframe servers--refrigerator-sized machines handling critical jobs such as retailer inventory--cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.
Third-place IBM, which dropped a smidgen from 14.5 percent to 14.3 percent, is in the process of revamping its Intel servers with technology drawn from its higher-end Unix and mainframe lines.
Sun Microsystems, which sells only Unix servers, is in fifth place, dropping from 6.4 percent to 6.3 percent, Gartner said.
Meanwhile, a separate study of shipments in the European PC market by Context shows more strength at Dell and more difficulty at Compaq and HP.
"The combined HP-Compaq share has dropped from 25.5 percent to 23 percent, while Dell has continued its rise from 11 percent to 11.6 percent," said Context analyst Jeremy Davies in an e-mail exchange. "It certainly lends weight to the feeling that the merger has either spooked customers, taken employees' eyes off the ball, or both."
Individually, Compaq dropped from 15.9 percent to 14.1 percent and HP dropped from 9.6 percent to 8.9 percent. Davies attributes much of the decline to curtailed spending among corporations.
The overall figures indicate no sign of "any market recovery for Europe as had been hoped," Davies said. Unit shipments in the United Kingdom, France and Germany dropped 17.4 percent. |
