India pulls another growth year for the x86 and the UNIX space. The star verticals BFSI, Telcom and Manufacturing drove the market.

AMD's escalating clout in the server space became evident over the year. According to the estimates in the first quadrant of 2006 provided by Mercury Research, worldwide processor market share of AMD's x86 server market grew to 22.1% in Q1 '06 up from 16.4% in Q4 '05, a 35% increase. AMD has identified India as an important market and designated it as a high growth region. 

Server prices hit all time low over the year with all vendors offering entry level servers based on the x86 architecture (32-bit) for the price of a PC. In fact, in this segment of the market, the distinction between a professional PC and a server is blurring.

The UNIX side, a turf dominated by Sun, saw some changes. IBM, attacked the UNIX space with aggression and in the bargain, the UNIX server market over the year became a three horse race with Sun, IBM and HP battling it out.

Another major trend over the year was the escalation of blade servers that became part of the mainstream computing environment. The rapid adoption of blades is clearly changing the personality of servers. Typical candidates for blades are enterprises, which already have more tower servers and when those enterprise expanded, they went in for blades.

CIOs looking at maximizing their IT spend, looked at server consolidation and virtualization very seriously. The need to optimize the usage of IT resources within the enterprise prompted large enterprises to consider server and application consolidation solutions.

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