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发表于 2003-09-03 10:49 |只看该作者 |倒序浏览

IBM Takes Lead in Server Market, but What about the iSeries?
by  Mary Lou Roberts
Industry Reporter

September 02, 2003 —  An IDC report released last Friday spelled great news for IBM: Big Blue has regained its number one spot as leader in the worldwide server market, pushing the previous leader, Hewlett-Packard, back down to number two.

Overall, IDC reports, second-quarter server sales have halted a nine-quarter decline in year-on-year growth in the server market. And, while the analyst group cautions that it’s “too soon to declare that the worldwide server market has begun to rebound,” the second quarter’s dramatic 17.5 percent increase in server shipments — bringing total second-quarter sales to 1.2 million units — is clearly encouraging news for the industry. However, factory revenues of $10.6 billion for the quarter barely budged from 2Q02, inching up less than 1/2 percent.

IBM’s performance this quarter was impressive, with Big Blue sitting pretty on a 30.4 percent market share, up from 27.7 percent in 2002, with a more than 10 percent climb in revenue over 2Q02. HP’s market share, on the other hand, remained flat at 27.7 percent, with revenue growth of less than 1/2 percent. Sun Microsystems, in third place, lost its grip on the market, with revenue plummeting nearly 19 percent and market share sliding down to just 13.5 percent.

The study notes that the biggest single segment by unit shipments worldwide — the Windows server market — grew 11.5 percent in 2Q03, while the Unix server market declined 5.2 percent. Within the Unix segment, however, IBM achieved significant gains, achieving 20.4 percent revenue increases.

This is especially noteworthy because, as Lloyd Cohen, IDC’s research director of Global Enterprise Server Solutions, notes in the IDC press release, Unix servers lead the global market in revenue, accounting for 40 percent of the worldwide total — as opposed to the Windows segment, which leads by volume. “The Unix server segment is the largest slice of the entire worldwide server market, with more than 40 percent of the revenue share in 2Q03. “Unix systems,” Cohen said, “along with the associated software and services tied to these solutions, continue to drive much of the overall enterprise IT spending.”

Certainly, there is joy in Armonk. But is there joy in Rochester?

Looking forward, sales projections for the iSeries do not bode well for the platform. John Jones, managing director of SoundView Technology Group, notes that the second quarter iSeries numbers represented a 6 percent growth over first quarter. However, he predicts a 2 percent drop in third-quarter revenue, with the iSeries finishing the year with total 2003 revenue up about 3 percent to $1.7 billion.

“There’s a lot of pressure from Linux and Windows,” Jones says. “They have been pressuring the product line for some time. IBM gets good margins on the iSeries — but they don’t get real growth. The overwhelming trends are to Linux and Microsoft.”

Steve Josselyn, IDC’s research director for global enterprise server solutions, acknowledges that the iSeries had “two decent quarters.” But, he says, the research indicates that projections for the bulk of the forecast period (though 2007) are essentially flat. In fact, “we show a compound annual growth rate for the iSeries of negative 10 percent.” IDC expects Windows to grow 7.1 percent over the same time period and Linux to grow 28.3 percent.

Compare, for example, IDC’s projections for OS/400 servers with the projections for Linux and Windows. This year, IDC expects OS/400 to generate $2.4 billion in revenue, dropping steadily to about $1.4 billion in 2007. Windows platforms, on the other hand, should generate $14.2 billion this year, inching up to $19.5 billion in 2007. Linux should grow from about $3 billion in 2003 revenue to $8 billion in 2004. (IDC’s revenue numbers also include software revenue.)

Josselyn says that IDC is currently reviewing this forecast and will be updating the numbers in October. However, he says, “I don’t expect to see anything different.”

Is the iSeries Too Good to Market?
by  Mary Lou Roberts
Industry Reporter

August 28, 2003 —  iSeries lovers are, above all, a faithful and loyal group. Indeed, some might call them zealots. They believe so strongly in the platform and its capabilities, reliability, and durability, they simply cannot understand why IBM will not take this message to the masses so that all can share in the glory.

While no one outside of IBM knows the real numbers spent on marketing, advertising, and other promotional efforts for the various server platforms, it does seem to many that the iSeries simply doesn’t get its fair share of attention.

Why? There’s no shortage of theories to answer this question — none of which is likely to be given in a formal response from IBM. The official Big Blue answer is that IBM gets more bang for its buck by marketing the eServer brand.

But one IBM insider, who asks not to be named, points out (with frustration) that, from IBM’s corporate point of view, it just wouldn’t make sense to push the iSeries. IBM — historic home of the big iron — is all about services these days. In fact, of IBM’s 315,000 or so employees, 173,000 work in Global Services, according to SoundView Technology Group.

“The iSeries is such a good machine that it doesn’t sell services,” the IBM insider believes. Plus, most of the IBM software you’d want or need already comes packaged with the box. “If IBM really marketed it, everyone would buy it. ... But then IBM wouldn’t sell services, software, and reliability/backup. As it is, the customer is the best marketing the platform has.”

Larry Wood, president and senior consultant at LWC Inc., proclaims his unofficial title to be “iSeries bigot.” He also believes that “the word is to make money with Global Services any way they can, and that boils down to a lot of work in the Intel platform market space. The PC mentality has gotten hold of the purse strings at IBM and they have convinced the marketers that everyone wants to do either Linux or Windows programming.”

Analyst Wayne Kernochen, managing v.p. of Aberdeen Group, doesn’t entirely disagree with that theory, and he acknowledges that IBM is certainly pursuing services-led sales. But while Kernochen agrees that IBM doesn’t seem particularly determined to sell the iSeries, “there doesn’t appear to be any big push from companies to buy it either. You could look at it this way,” he quips, “the reason the iSeries hasn’t done worse is precisely because it’s such a good piece of equipment.”

Although last year’s GreenStreak promotion and this year’s price cuts on interactive processing spurred sales to the install base, new customers are few and far between,” says analyst Steve Josselyn, an IDC research director. In fact, he questions whether some of the customers who are listed as “new” are just customers who have been inactive for a while.

John Jones, managing director of SoundView Technology Group, suggests some even more basic reasons for the absence of marketing emphasis. “The reality,” he says, “is that the entire server business is roughly 12 percent of revenue at IBM and about 10 to 12 percent of profit. The iSeries is only 2 percent of revenue, and mainframes drive most of the software sale. Servers simply are not nearly as important as a percentage of revenue as they used to be. For now, IBM views the iSeries and the zSeries as cash cows, and the xSeries and pSeries as the growth engines.”

But Wood points fingers, too, at today’s education system. “As far as I am concerned,” he says, “the academic world is to blame for teaching crummy application development to youngsters (or none at all). IBM is to blame for not supporting enough education and not pumping enough incentives into colleges and universities. And for all of this, no one has the time to find out what a terrific architecture the iSeries really has. Everyone in college computer science courses should be made to read the book, Fortress Rochester.

Nigel Fortlage, vice president IT for GHY International, says, “It comes down to corporate IBM — not the iSeries team. They aren’t listening, and they are afraid to promote such a strong box, because how will they sell their other boxes when they can cut four lines down to two from the zSeries to the iSeries. That is, until the hardware environment merges to become one and then we have an eServer that is separated by the operating system and nothing else. Install OS/400 and it is an iSeries. Install AIX and it is a pSeries. What about installing Linux? What is it then? My answer: still the best single consolidated box on the market, bar none.”

Garry Taylor, an iSeries system administrator, points to cost issues in marketing the iSeries. “It is quite an unattractive machine on paper,” he says. “Compare the pSeries and the iSeries pricing. The iSeries is chronically expensive, and while existing users know that the machine may be worth the extra cost due to low TCO and high uptime, new potential customers will simply see these claims as marketing-speak and not take it very seriously.”

When Sun is selling servers for a fraction of the cost that IBM asks for an iSeries, it’s hard to make a case on paper for why a new customer should opt for the more expensive piece of hardware, he says. “IBM would need to get serious with the pricing of the iSeries to get new users in great numbers,” he says, “but to do so would be to severely affect the margins on selling machines to existing users.”

There is, then, no shortage of theories on why Big Blue might be unwilling or unable to push the virtues of what iSeries zealots believe is the best platform in the world.

It is natural, of course, for IBM to want to drive up revenues and profits — all companies do. In realizing this goal, though, do the “Blue Shirts” wish the iSeries would fade away? Perhaps. The industrialized world has been building in planned obsolescence for decades to keep the dollars flowing. In that one respect, IBM may have really blown it with the iSeries, as the boxes and the supporters keep chugging along.