Like the most of us (except the bankers) global sales of servers have taken a beating since the first quarter of 2008. Server sales have declined over $3 billion due to the economic slowdown meltdown recession and the growth of virtualization. Today, the global server market stands below $10 billion.

Since Q1 of 2008 IBM‘s server revenues has declined over $1 billion from $3.946 billion to $2.913 in Q1 2009. Big Blues market share also declined from 30% to 29.3% during the same period. On the other hand HP‘s revenues grew from$2.904 billion to $3.624 billion and grew their market share to 29.3%, matching IBM in Q1 2009. Dell‘s revenues dropped from  $1.590 billion in 2008 Q1  with a 12.1% market share to revenues of $1.093 billion and a 11% market share in Q1 2009.

According to the ChannelInsider article:

• No quick recovery for server sales until general economy recovers (CI)
• End users continue to extend life of existing servers (CI, other sources)
• Servers remain among the least profitable for solution providers (CI: Market Pulse)
• Demand for conventional and blade servers by end users continues to shrink (CI: Market Pulse)•Popularity of data center virtualization technologies have had the collateral effect of shrinking server hardware demand (CI)