The growing popularity of Cloud services has not hindered the local server industry, with enterprise investment in servers forecast to continue over the next five years, according to IDC.
IDC senior analyst, infrastructure, Trevor Clarke, said that the Australian server market would remain robust until at least 2015.
"However, on the other hand as a result of economic troubles and the impacts of natural disasters, New Zealand organisations will face a tougher 2011 than their peers across the ditch with spending on server platforms tempered,” Clarke said in a statement.
"However, NZ spending on servers will also continue to grow until 2015."
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The analyst firm’s recent report into the A/NZ server market predicted flat growth in customer revenues across the region due to falling prices; however, will experience a rise in unit shipments with a compound annual growth rate of five per cent to 2015.
"Virtualization and multicore technologies will enable customers to migrate higher-end enterprise workloads from Unix and mainframes to x86 server platforms," IDC associate director, infrastructure, Matt Oostveen said.
"This will result in the x86 segment growing faster than all other CPU types and make server systems based on this architecture the most popular across A/NZ."
According to Oostveen, the mainframe and Unix systems will continue to operate in the market, but take on a much less prominent role than in past years.
“But they are still the bastion of RAS computing in some of the biggest organisations in the region," he said.
The firm has also forecasted an ongoing shift to high density computing based on blade technology and growing interest in integrated infrastructure, while Linux is to continue subtracting share from the Windows OS in the coming years.
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