Research firm, International Data Corporation (IDC) released this week its Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker that revealed factory revenue in the worldwide server market increased 15.3 percent year over year to $15.0 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010 (4Q10). This was the highest quarterly revenue in three years and the fourth consecutive quarter with improving year-over-year revenue growth as the market continued to accelerate throughout the calendar year.

“Non-x86 platforms contributed significantly to the server market recovery in the fourth quarter and it remains clear that a variety of heterogeneous server platforms remain an integral part of a comprehensive enterprise IT strategy today,” said Matt Eastwood, group vice president of IDC’s Enterprise Platforms Group. “At the same time, data centers are being optimized to support virtualization, automation, convergence, workload-optimized systems, and cloud strategies in both large and small organizations around the globe. For end-users, there are more IT choices available than ever, many of which are designed to deliver impressive price-performance gains to the data center and virtually all of these IT infrastructure solutions leverage server platforms at their core.”