Workstation report
The workstation market regaining its health, but the road to a full recovery won’t be short
So far, the second half of 2009 for the workstation market is proceeding according to the script we wrote several quarters ago. A recovery is surely taking hold, but rather than the fast and furious type, it looks to be more of the slow and steady variety.
Q3’09 wasn’t a gangbuster quarter for the industry, but then it wasn’t expected to be. What we did predict was that the quarter would affirm two things: one, that the market did indeed bottom during the first half of 2009, and two, that the second quarter’s modest uptick wasn’t an aberration. And on those counts, the third quarter of 2009 came through, delivering modestly better results than did Q2. All told, the industry shipped 644.6 thousand workstations, resulting in a 7.1% sequential increase over the second quarter (and a more moderate 24.5% year-over-year decline).
| Workstation shipments | Q2CY08 | Q3CY08 | Q4CY08 | Q1CY09 | Q2CY09 | Q3CY09 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total (K units) | 867.4 | 854.2 | 764.3 | 576.7 | 602.1 | 644.6 |
The third quarter’s growth was of course welcome, but certainly doesn’t signal an imminent return to the robust market levels of 2007 and 2008. Rather than making a dramatic stride forward, it instead marked one small step on what’s more likely a prolonged road to recovery. The way it’s panning out, the climb back up will take a lot longer than did the fall down.
HP stakes its claim as the top workstation provider
It was just a matter of time. One look at the market share trend lines, and it wasn’t a stretch to envision HP some day overtaking Dell as the volume leader in workstation market. In just a few short years, HP had climbed from a distant second in the market into a virtual dead heat with long-time leader. But in the third quarter, HP jumped to a 40.3% market share, in the process pulling away from Dell (at 37.5%) to mark the first time (in the firm’s records) HP held clear control as the workstation volume leader.
It’s been a dramatic reversal of fortunes. Looking back five years, Dell looked poised to dominate the workstation market by a wide margin. But then triggered (in part) by its long-standing strategy to stick exclusively with Intel rather than exploit upstart AMD’s surging Opteron platform, Dell’s workstation share slowly dropped, by the first quarter of 2006 down to a low of 37.7%.
When Intel finally bounced back starting in the second half of 2006, so did Dell, but not as strongly. Because even though Dell had regained its footing, HP had been pressing its foot firmly on the gas and coming up fast in Dell’s rear-view mirror. And finally in the third quarter, HP surged past to claim its current position as the industry’s top dog.
Table of Contents
- Methodology
- No longer tracking Traditional Proprietary Workstations, effective Q3’08
- Some – but not all - white-box coverage
- Workstation shares by machine class
- Workstation shares by vendor
- HP stakes its claim as the top workstation provider
- Workstation distribution by vendor within class
- Breaking down the market by platform
- Intel more dominant than ever
- AMD’s Opteron continues to struggle
- 1S vs. 2S shipments
- Segmented by operating system
- Tier 1 distribution of workstations by geography
- A more evenly distributed global marketplace
- Full-year calendar 2008 results for workstations
- Professional graphics hardware market in Q3’09
- More evidence of a rebound in Q3’09 ... but a full recovery will take some time
- ASPs up modestly in Q3’09, as somewhat looser purse-strings lead to a tick up in higher-end product
- Professional graphics hardware market breakdown by product class
- ATI vs. Nvidia
- Full-year calendar 2008 results for professional graphics hardware
- Outlook on the workstation and professional graphics markets
