Although there is a new ray of hope that the market would witness a revival once the economy starts picking up, the vendors and partners need to roll up their sleeves and put in a lot of effort. At any rate, the fact remains that the server market would probably not go back to its heydays, as new technologies like virtualization would have a long-term impact on server sales.

While recession is considered a passing phase and is expected to end soon, the server market is going to get influenced by various other factors. CIOs, by and large, are rethinking about their hardware investment. In the recently published CIO Mindtrack-Hardware Strategies survey, about 45 percent of the respondents said they have reduced their hardware budget for 2009--10. The survey also reveals some of the potential changes in the CIO's server buying patterns. More than 45 percent of the CIOs said that the biggest challenge they face with their current hardware infrastructure is to deal with excessive servers. This means that businesses would prefer to buy less number of servers in the coming days because of issues relates to space, manageability, and high operational cost. And recession is just one more reason for enterprises to rethink about their hardware infrastructure.

"Server sprawl is definitely one of the biggest headaches of CIOs today," says Mishra of Gartner. So, how do the vendors address this scenario? Arunangshu Basu, Sever & Alliances Manger of Dell India, says, "We go and tell customers to evaluate their existing infrastructure. Their old and low-end servers would have exhausted. We suggest them to deploy new and high-end machines, which will give more performance. There is no need to keep running the old machines, which will cause huge operational cost." George Paul, Executive Vice President, HCL Infosystems, says, "We address the current scenario with servers based on new processor architectures that deliver much higher performance per watt and hence can replace the older higher power consuming and lesser performance delivering servers."

Vendors say, by replacing old machines and going for new-generation servers, customers would be able to get more benefit and save more money, especially because more number of low-end machines can be replaced by less high-end machines. R Ravichandran, Director- Sales, Intel South Asia, says, "They would be able to save space, power, etc, and also reduce the cost of maintaining huge number of servers." Rajesh Dhar, Director, Industry Standard Servers, Hewlett Packard India Sales, adds, "Besides power and space, they can save a lot by cutting down their cooling and licensing costs as the number of servers in their data centers would drastically come down when they go for better performing machines." This is further reinforced by some of the findings of the CIO Mindtrack survey. More than 93 percent of the CIOs who took part in the survey confirmed that energy efficiency is the most important parameter while procuring servers, which precisely concludes that there would be more demand for efficient servers.