APAC server market grows in 2003

Despite the advent of SARS and the lull in the economy, the Asia/Pacific server market continued to grow in 2003, in terms of vendor revenue. Asia/Pacific server vendor revenue totalled above $5 billion in 2003, a 6.7 percent rise over 2002, according to Dataquest, a unit of Gartner.

Gartner analyst Matthew Boon, Vice President for Hardware and Systems said, " 2003 actually illustrated the resilience of the local market to adversity such as SARS and the conflict in Iraq, with the market putting on a healthy 6.7% vendor revenue growth in 2003 when compared to 2002."

Boon further noted some of the Intel versus RISC server nuances: "Vendor revenues in the server space grew some 5% in the RISC server space, while the Intel based server market grew in excess of 7%. While this clearly shows a continued shift to Intel based architecture in Asia Pacific, it also highlights the fact that not all organizations are convinced and many organizations invested heavily in RISC/UNIX based systems as they hit critical replacement cycle stages.

China ranked No. 1 country for server vendor revenue in Asia/Pacific with 32.4 percent market share. Its share increased from 31.6 percent in 2002. China grew 9.8 percent in 2003.

The Indian server market recorded yearly revenue growth of 31.9 percent in 2003. "The Indian market has been growing steadily, given the healthy economy and improved business confidence," said Vinod Nair-Analyst, Computing Systems, Gartner India. "Server deployments in Finance and banking and telecom sector have been the main drivers in 2003.”