According to figures just released from IDC, the global server market had its fifth consecutive year-over-year decline in Q3 2009. The good news for the server market is that while shipments declined 17.9% year-over year for Q3, the server market grew sequentially compared to Q2 2009 for the first time since Q4 2008. Growth in the market compared to Q2 2009 was 12.4%. Despite growth compared to the previous quarter, revenue in the server market still dropped 17.3% compared to Q3 2008 to $10.4 billion.

IDC's Matt Eastwood said, "The worldwide server market exceeded expectations in the third quarter with improving x86 server demand leading the way, which was driven in part by the infrastructure refresh momentum that is building in many geographies. In fact, x86 server revenues experienced their largest sequential quarterly revenue increase in nearly five years."

IDC reports that IBM and HP ended the quarter in a statistical tie for the overall market share with 31.8% and 30.9% respectively. IBM's revenue declined 12.9% year-over-year while HP declined 16.8% year-over-year. Dell took third place in the market with 13.5% market share and Sun took fourth place with 7.5% of the market. Fifth place went to Fujitsu with 5.7% of the market.

IDC reports that the revenue in the Windows server market for Q3 2009 totaled $5.4 billion making for 43% of all server revenue in the quarter. The Linux server marker declined 12.6% for the quarter compared to 2009 with $2.8 billion in revenue. Unix servers have a 23.4% revenue decline with Q3 2009 revenue of $2.8 billion. Overall x86 server market revenue declined 12.3% compared to Q3 2008 to $6.1 billion. However, the x86 server market grew by a robust 18.7% when compared to Q2 2009.

"The x86 marketplace began showing expected signs of recovery in the third quarter of 2009. Customers found a convincing value proposition to refresh their systems due to strong product releases from vendors powered by the latest Intel and AMD processors. IDC expects much of the weakness found in the first half of 2009 to be a direct result of not only constrained IT budgets, but also pent-up demand for these devices," said Daniel Harrington, research analyst, Enterprise Server Group.

IDC released its numbers for the CPU market in November. The numbers showed that the CPU market had grown a significant 23% compared to Q3 2008.