The impact of the market forces acting upon the Canadian server market, such as technologies (cloud computing, virtualization, and multicore processors), go-to-market strategies, vendor product and pricing strategies, and customer demands, 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.
Technology Coverage and Data Segmentation
The Canadian Quarterly Server Tracker provides total market size and vendor share for the following technology areas and segmentations. Measurement for this tracker is in shipments and revenue.
Technologies and subtechnologies:
Server class (volume, midrange, high end)
Form factor (blade, tower, rack optimized, and density optimized)
Architecture (x86, EPIC, RISC, CISC)
Operating system (Windows, Linux, Unix, etc.)
Granular model-level data for all vendors
Segmentations:
CPU-type shipment and revenue information by vendor and operating system
Blade, tower, and rack-optimized servers by vendor, operating system, core count, and CPU capability
CPU brand-level data at the model level
Vendor shipment data by 11 price bands
Vendor shipment data by socket capability
Geographic Scope
Canada
Forecast Coverage
Forecasts for this tracker are updated quarterly and include historical data, two years of quarterly forecasts, and an additional three years of annual market projections. Examples of the segmentations being forecast in this tracker include:
Unit and revenue forecast: View by operating system, CPU type, rack factor, price band, socket capability, and so forth
Delivery Schedule and Deliverables
This tracker is delivered on a quarterly basis via an Excel pivot table. The delivery schedule for this tracker is as follows:
Final data: Week 10 after period closes
Forecast data: Week 12 after period closes
Ten hours per year of telephone inquiry time to support questions regarding data usage
IDC's Tracker Methodology
IDC's tracker data is developed using a rigorous methodology that includes well-planned and well-coordinated local, regional, and worldwide data cross-checks combined with a proprietary advanced data consolidation and analysis data platform managed by IDC's Worldwide Tracker organization. Data sources used in the process of determining IDC's tracker numbers include, but are not limited to:
In-country local vendor interviews
Distribution data feeds
Worldwide and regional vendor guidance
ODM data
In-country local channel partner discussions
Import records
Feedback from component suppliers
Vendor briefings and public financial reports
Enabling Better Business Decisions Across the Organization
IDC trackers provide the accurate and timely market size, vendor share, and forecast information you need to identify market and product expansion opportunities, increase revenue, and win market share. IDC's tracker research is a critical input to the planning and monitoring cycles of the business process. Common uses of the tracker data include:
Planning Process
Regional, state, or city-level planning — setting regional, country, state, or city-level sales targets based on market opportunity
Product marketing — creating a product strategy and road map based on currently available product features and expected growth
Production planning — using customer demand data as an input in the creation of production schedules
Product portfolio planning — accessing accurate and detailed data as an input into the product development process
Monitoring Process
Performance measurement — comparing vendor performance on prior fiscal periods
