A future where New Zealand companies no longer buy servers is unlikely to come within the next five years, according to IDC, but the research company says nonetheless, the server market will post flat growth out to 2015.

IDC senior analyst, infrastructure, Trevor Clarke, says while the Australian server market remains robust and will continue to do so out to 2015, New Zealand is in for a slightly rougher time. "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 says. "However, New Zealand spending on servers will also continue to grow until 2015.”Australia and New Zealand Server Market Analysis and Forecast, 2011-2015 forecasts flat growth in customer revenues across the two countries as a result of falling prices, although rises will come in unit shipments with a compound annual growth rate to 2015 of 5%, driven by x86 growth."Virtualisation and multi-core technologies will enable customers to migrate higher-end enterprise workloads from Unix and mainframes to x86 server platforms. 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 ANZ,” IDC associate director, infrastructure, Matt Oostveen, says. "However, the mainframe and Unix systems will continue to play a part in the market, albeit a less prominent one than in years past. But they are still the bastion of RAS computing in some of the biggest organisations in the region.”IDC is also forecasting an ongoing shift to high density computing based on blade technology and increased interest in integrated infrastructure, and for Linux to continue to take share away from the Windows OS in the next few years.