Gartner says the financial services industry led all vertical markets in server revenue for IT firms, accounting for 25.1% of worldwide server revenue in 2006. Among vendors, IBM accounted for the largest share of this revenue.
The communication market was a distant No. 2 segment for server revenue with 13.5% of global server revenue, and the government market was the No. 3 vertical with 11.5% of total server revenue.
"The financial services market has been the investment leader for all IT spending and the server market is no exception," says Kiyomi Yamada, senior research analyst at Gartner. "In 2006, many financial institutions faced challenges for operational risk management and regulatory requirements. This led to structural changes, and this, in turn, resulted in more server sales."
IBM was the leading vendor in the financial services market, accounting for 44.6% of server revenue in 2006. Hewlett-Packard was the No.2 vendor in this market with a 26.7% market share, followed by Sun Microsystems in third place on 9.1%.