The impact of the market forces acting upon the Canadian server market, such as technologies (virtualization and multicore processors), go-to-market strategies, vendor product and pricing strategies, and customer demands, among others, makes targeting the server market opportunities a challenge. IDC's Canadian Quarterly Server Tracker provides a comprehensive view of today's highly consolidated server market, identifying growing market segments for server vendors to align products and sales resources with market demand. This market intelligence service provides a complete understanding of current trends for volume, midrange, and high-end enterprise server markets, uncovering opportunities as they arise with industry-leading analysis and insights to address them. Identifying market trends and technology adoption rates can help a sales force more effectively retire quotas, leading to increased revenue growth and market share. The supply-side research is supported by demand-side and channel resources encompassing all major technologies, price bands, and product lines in the Canadian server market.

This product covers the following segments of the Canadian server market:

• Vendor (Dell, HP, IBM, Sun, and others)
• Server class (volume, midrange, high end)
• Form factor (blade, rack, and non-rack servers)
• Architecture (x86, EPIC, RISC, CISC)
• Operating system (Windows, Linux, Unix, NetWare, OS/390, OS/400, etc.)

Throughout the year, this product will address the following topics:

• Quarterly unit shipments and factory and customer revenue
• Vendor shipment and revenue information by family, model, and 11 price bands
• Operating system shipments and revenue
• Granular model-level data for all vendors
• CPU type shipment and revenue information by vendor and operating system
• Blade and rack-optimized servers by vendor, operating system, core count, and CPU capability
• CPU brand-level data at the model level

Our research addresses the following issues that are critical to your success:

1. What is the relative performance of the volume, midrange, and high-end server market segments?
2. Which vendor is gaining the most share in the enterprise and volume server segments?
3. How much of an impact is Itanium having on the Canadian server market?
4. How fast are blade servers being adopted, and which vendors are seeing the most success?
5. How fast are Windows-based servers increasing their share of market, and what has been the impact on other servers?
6. How will dual-core and multicore CPUs impact the Canadian server market?

IDC's Canadian Quarterly Server Tracker provides a quantitative assessment of the state of the server market across a variety of metrics, including unit shipments, revenue, price bands, and operating systems. This quarterly tracking product reviews the relative positions of the vendors that shape the market, providing family- and model-level detail. Companies tracked include Acer, Apple, Dell, Gateway, HP, IBM, NCR, NEC, SGI, Sun Microsystems, and Unisys.

Throughout the year, this product will offer insight into the latest trends impacting the market.

• Vendor
• Family
• Model
• Price band
• Operating system
• CPU capability
• Core count
• CPU architecture and brand

• Week 9: Final data delivered by Excel pivot table
• Ten hours per year of telephone inquiry time to support questions regarding data usage

Nine weeks after the close of each quarter, clients will receive an easy-to-follow email with instructions on how to download the data file from the IDC Tracker Web site.

Ten hours of access to an analyst for specific inquiries is included.

This market update and strategy review provides analysis, insights, and in-depth guidance on the server ecosystem with customized advice.

As a privately held company, IDC believes that our customers are our primary constituency. A large percentage of every revenue dollar is reinvested back into our products, including more analysts, more geographic coverage, and extensive primary research.

Our steady growth over the past 10-plus years reflects our commitment to investing in our customers.