The big server makers cannot buy a break these days. The latest IDC research provides more evidence,showing that for the first quarter, worldwide server revenue was down nearly 8 percent. That’s even worse than Gartner’s data, released earlier this week, which showed worldwide server revenue down 5 percent.
According to IDC, revenue for every name-brand server maker except Dell and Cisco, was down. Market leader Hewlett-Packard saw its revenue for the period off 14.8 percent year over year. (On the last HP earnings call, CEO Meg Whitman acknowledged that the company is passing on low-margin server deals.) Looks like Dell, with revenue up 10.1 percent year over year, is picking up the slack.
Cisco, which is building from a much smaller base, was up a whopping 34.9 percent, but it’s still got a small slice of the pie with Q1 revenue at $ 450 million, compared to $ 2.9 billion for HP, $ 2.8 billion for IBM and just over $ 2 billion for Dell. Cisco’s market share rose to 4.1 percent from 2.8 percent.
Oracle’s hardware struggles continue — its revenue was off 28.2 percent year over year and its market share fell to 2.8 percent from 4.8 percent last year.
The much-watched non-brand-name “other” segment — which includes companies like Wistron and Quanta — saw aggregate revenue fall 1.7 percent but market share growing to 14.9 percent from 14 percent. Companies running huge data farms — the Googles and Facebooks — often turn to these companies for white box servers built to their specifications, a development that has to irk the name brands who seem to be seeing the addressable market for their servers shrinking.
Here’s Jordan Novet’s take on the Gartner research.
And now for the IDC numbers: 
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