To kick off my first posting here, I wanted to introduce myself and let the readers know that I’ll be blogging the Asia-Pacific (APAC) regional perspective as it pertains to Itanium. By the way, just to level set – by APAC, I am referring to all of Asia-Pacific including PRC but not Japan. I am the Regional Platform Marketing Manager at Intel based in Singapore.
Firstly, I want to talk about Itanium’s (continued) growth in the APAC marketplace in relation to how it is doing worldwide. You would’ve seen an earlier blog post last month about this and here are the APAC numbers based on IDC’s APAC Server Tracker for Q4 2008.
Itanium system revenue has been growing steadily since 2004 and annual system revenue grew 40% year-on-year from 2007 to 2008. By comparison, the competing RISC architectures like IBM POWER and Sun SPARC grew only 4% and declined 19% respectively. At the worldwide level, Itanium systems grew 18% while IBM POWER declined 22% and Sun SPARC declined 10%. So clearly, Itanium is growing faster than the rest of the competing RISC architectures and growing at a faster rate in APAC than worldwide.
Another data point from this report is that Itanium annual system revenue for 2008 versus IBM POWER grew 35% to 64%, and versus Sun SPARC it grew 74% to 117%. Itanium systems are now “out-shipping” Sun SPARC in APAC. (At the worldwide level, Itanium versus IBM POWER is at 64% while versus Sun SPARC, it is at 91%).
Based on the data, clearly Itanium system revenue is growing faster than both IBM POWER and Sun SPARC with the APAC market leading this growth.