Market research firm Garner Dataquest recently offered up a new report on the state of the worldwide and US server markets, and Apple’s numbers are on the list. While Apple’s percentages are small compared with other more established players in the server market, the study may provide some sort of baseline to judge future performance on.
| <?php virtual(“/includes/boxad.inc”); ?> |
Specifically, Gartner Dataquest’s US figures break out Apple’s performance. Out of a total of 488,858 units shipping this quarter, 5,700 were Apple systems — a 1.2 percent marketshare. On their own the numbers aren’t overwhelming, but consider that for the same quarter a year ago, Apple shipped only 1,525 server units. That’s a year-to-year growth of 273.8 percent, the best growth on the list.
The difference? This year, Apple began shipping the Xserve. Xserve is a rack-mounted system which runs Mac OS X Server. Last year at this time, Apple’s servers were still exclusively Power Mac G4 desktop systems reconfigured with server software.
Market leaders like HP and Dell don’t have much to fear from Apple, as they’re each shipping more than 100,000 servers each quarter, but Gartner Dataquest’s report is an indication that the Xserve is definitely attracting more interest than Apple’s previous server offerings.