Year in Review: Industry and the economy in 2009

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A hard hit for hardware…

There is no question that 2009 has been the year of the virtual world and software. Virtualisation, cloud computing, deduplication, all these technologies go above and beyond the humble server box and more people are moving outwards than investing internally.

To this end it has been a tough year for the hardware market, servers especially which seem to have taken the brunt of the decline.

The year didn’t get off to a great start as at the end of 2008 the server market had experienced its worst revenue decline since 2005 according to IDC’s Quarterly Server Tracker.

The recession was slowing down spending and encouraging people to look for alternative options rather than ripping and replacing their old kit.

The drops kept on coming as sales continued to fall. In May, IDC confirmed the third quarter in a row that revenues had fallen and actually hit the lowest that the analyst firm had seen since it began tracking the market 12 years ago.

Yet as early as this in the year positive predictions were coming through and IDC believed that server demand would improve in the second half of the year and go on to grow in 2010 as the economy recovered.

But by the time September rolled around the server market had broken new records, again hitting the lowest sales numbers and revenues since records began.

Gartner showed revenues dropping by almost 30 per cent and even the popular market leading x86 server revenues falling by 25.7 per cent.

And 2009 doesn’t end happily for this market with December figures not only showing drops for the market as a whole, but showing double digit declines for four of the top five vendors.

However, analysts continued to be positive saying the dips were lessening and there were signs of stabilisation. We will have to wait and see if 2010 brings the positivity it desperately needs.

Recession bites but recovery beckons…

It has been a tough year for the industry, even for solid popular markets like mobile phones, but it seems as the country begins to recover from the recession so does IT.

There are positive signs for the future and innovations like netbooks and smartphones are helping out in the meantime but the proof will be in the pudding of 2010.

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