Local IT spend grew by 10% in 2001 to R33.9 billion against the previous year, according to server and commercial systems research released this week by BMI-T. Unit sales, however, decreased from 20 387 in 2000 to 20 022 in 2001, a drop of 1.8%. This most recent report includes sales of both Standard Intel Architecture Server (SIAS) and commercial systems.
Heading up the growth figures, Unix grew by 13.3% in 2001 while Windows NT/2000 and other operating systems declined in the past year. Open source operating system Linux accounts for 6% of predominantly low-end systems according to Chant'el Mann, senior analyst at BMI-T. Mann says, however, that this figure only reflects systems delivered with Linux pre-installed and the actual figure may well be higher.
The entry level server market took a knock in the last year, suffering a revenue drop of more than 16%, while the mid-range market grew by close on 29%. Commenting on the changes, Mann says that she expects the low-end trend to alter in 2002 with a growing demand for front-end servers and e-commerce engines. In the mid-range sector, ongoing growth is expected on the back of increasing demand for scalable database servers.
The big winner in 2001, however, was the high-end server sector that grew by 40.7% according to the survey. Mann attributed this growth largely to the introduction of the HP Superdome. "This is the first time HP has moved into the high-end market and appears to have been well received by the users. IBM continues to hold a strong lead in the market with 37.6% of the market share. There is a trend in the high-end market of end-users replacing their current mainframe systems with high-powered Unix systems. This is evident in Sun`s revenue growth of 31.2% in 2001," she says.
Breaking down the vendor matrix, Man says that in the Unix space Sun captured the number one spot in all three segments. In the Windows NT/2000 space for the entry server segment, Compaq retained the number one position, while Unisys came out tops in the mid-range sector. Mann points out, though, that there were no Windows NT/2000 products sold in the high-end segment.
Looking ahead, BMI-T reports that it expects a compound annual growth rate of 9.1% in revenues for the period 2002 to 2006. Mann says that in the short term, it is expected that spending levels in the SA market will be restrained in the first half of 2002, due to the detrimental effect on server spending caused by lack of customer confidence. As a result, the current growth projection for 2002 is set at 12.5% in SA.
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