With earnings season a month away, market watchers trying to get a sense of the year ahead are focusing on macro economic news, various market research reports and week-to-week news from leading tech vendors.

Factory revenue in the worldwide server market decreased 2.4 percent year over year to $11.8 billion in the first quarter of 2012, according to released this week.

It was the second consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue decline, according to IDC. One reason for the year-over-year slump was that the server market in 2011 experienced an uptick as companies refreshed their computing infrastructure, making it difficult for manufacturers to achieve relative gains this year.

Nevertheless, there are other reasons to be concerned.

"The larger concern for server vendors was the sharply lower revenue growth in Asia/Pacific, including China," wrote Matt Eastwood, in the report. "China is one of only three countries that regularly spend more than $1 billion quarterly on servers and any sustained reduction in revenue growth would be troubling for the market."