Never been a better time NOT to be selling servers

Anyone banking on those Q3 server sales bonuses to pay for that Chrimbo trip to sunnier climes better wrap up warm after a cool wind blew through the EMEA market. Shipments declined for the eighth consecutive quarter in the silly summer season, down 7 per cent on a year ago to 549,000 systems, preliminary data from Gartner …

[Dale Vile, Freeform Dynamics]

What about the big hosters?

Does anyone know if any of the analysts keeps track of servers installed in the mega-cloud datacentres owned by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc? Would be interesting to compare those numbers with server shipments direct to customers. And of the numbers quoted by Gartner, how many servers were shipped to internet/cloud service providers as opposed to normal businesses? Seems like the stats are only telling part of the story.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What about the big hosters?

I doubt these numbers include large cloud providers - they tend to custom build their own racks.

This makes Microsoft's last quarter results where server market share (over 75% of the x86 market) and revenue both grew even more impressive....

[spiny norman]

Re: What about the big hosters?

Next quarter IDC will have ODM numbers for the first time, and most of those go to cloud hosters. It'll be interesting to see what difference that makes to the size of the market. If a hoster buys components and builds the servers themselves, that won't show up, and I've never seen anything that separates service providers from others. Most of the big hosters at some time brag about how many servers they have, so you might be able to get an idea from that.