At least, that is if I can believe Gartner, who just send me this bit of news:

"Worldwide server shipments grew 23 per cent year over year in the first quarter of 2010, while revenue increased 6 per cent, according to Gartner, Inc."

Hurray! That means the crisis (at least in IT) is fading. It is about time, because server shipments were hitting rock bottom the last year.

However, that is not the whole story:

""We've seen a return to growth on a worldwide level, but the market has not yet returned to the historical quarterly highs that were posted in 2008, and there were some interesting variations in that growth," said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner. "Emerging regions that were expected to grow, such as Asia/Pacific, forged ahead, while some mature markets, such as the US, produced better-than-expected results, as other countries and regions had a 'mixed bag' of results.""

Also, x86 is doing great, but that is kinda commodity. You can't really do anything without x86. No wonder those sales went up. RISC/Itanium Unix is a different story, as is the mainframe. Those are more luxury markets, with companies buying if they can afford it. Seems that they can't.

Of course, you can have a good debate on whether those architectures offer any added value. But, a year ago, mainframe sales were actually gradually going up just before the whole crisis took off, so declining sales means that not all is good yet.

IBM has been hit hardest. HP already was the leader when it came to shipments, and now they have overtaken Big Blue on revenue as well.