Not Mick Jagger: X64 Server Buyers Get Satisfaction

Published: May 8, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Technology Business Research keeps track of how satisfied IT shops are with the servers they buy, and the firm has just released its first quarter survey of X64 server buyers. And generally speaking, it looks like X64 server buyers are a pretty happy lot.

The survey report was written by Julie Perron, manager of primary research at TBR, and it ranks the weighted satisfaction indexes of the three top X64 server suppliers--Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Dell. The indexes are based on polls of X64 survey buyers, and the 134-page report is complex and dices and slices what X64 server buyers are happy and miffed about in a lot of different ways.

Interestingly, the polls done by TBR indicate that 12 percent of HP's customer base and 6 percent of IBM's base have systems that employ Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices; Dell is only getting started. AMD's share of the X64 server market overall, in terms of chip counts, is much higher, which would seem to suggest that a number of customers have gone whole hog with Opteron chips. The TBR survey shows that 8 percent of HP's customers have deployed Itanium-based systems (which are not technically an X64 architecture), which stands to reason given the fact that the Integrity line of servers have replaced high-end HP, Compaq, and Digital systems. About 45 percent of the customers surveyed for the Q1 2007 TBR satisfaction report have deployed blade servers, and another 34 percent of the customers polled said that they would adopt blade servers for at least some of their workloads within the next year. The use of Linux among the TBR survey pool has risen to 50 percent of shops, up from 40 percent in the 2Q 2005 report. And, finally, server management tools are becoming strategic, which is something that blade server makers have been hammering on. Of the customers who switched X64 server brands in the past year, one quarter did so to get different management tools, according to the TBR report.

As far as the weighted satisfaction indexes go, HP was at 85.3, basically unchanged from the 85.2 rating the company had in the fourth quarter of 2006. HP's satisfaction rating has been rising every quarter for the past 18 months, and Perron says that on the X64 front, the company doesn't really have any issues to address that it is not already coping with. IBM's satisfaction ratings dropped from 84.6 in Q4 2006 to 82.4 in Q1 2007, and customers cited delivery time for boxes and on-site support as issues that caused Big Blue's ratings to decline. Dell, which was in the top-ranked position in the TBR satisfaction index back in the third quarter of 2005 and has been sliding since then, rose to 82.6 in Q1 2007, up from 82.1 in Q4 2006. With Dell rebounding a bit and IBM sliding a bit, they were in a statistical tie for the second spot in the TBR rankings for X64 server satisfaction.

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