Acer: Do They Stack Up After 3 Years In The Server Market?
Acer, the 4th largest PC vendor in the world decided to make an unexpected re-entry into the US server market in 2011. The Taiwanese company had previously invested in the same market, but it pulled out after a couple of years because of poor sales. They generated a high level of expectation from the consumers, in fact they started producing the servers in the US, proving that they have a valid case in their attempts to grab a piece of the server market from their competitors. Three years later, how are they performing?
The server market is pretty much still the same – dominated by IBM, HP, and Dell. The volatility of the hardware market ensures that the order shifts a lot, but very few hardware makers have enough market shares to be considered as major competitors. Acer has been generally disappointing, only managing to have a market share of around 2% which is nearly ten times less than what the market leader commands. Additionally the company is not even among the top five server hardware manufacturers according to recent sales figures. Acer thrives on selling inexpensive PC hardware and some industry experts argue that consumers are not willing to purchase inferior servers. In reality, Acer is just a victim of its relative youth in this market. They have a much smaller product range as opposed to their competitors and have left some segments of the server market unattended to.
However, the future looks very promising. The company recently announced support for the latest and more powerful Intel Xeon v2series processors to be used in its new line of Altos servers. The introduction of the Veriton thin client workstations is also a welcome boost to the company’s product range. The company has chosen to focus on its line of Altos servers, which should be able to compete with all the major competitors in the market. With PC sales falling, the manufacturer needs to diversify its hardware sales strategy to fix the ever-dropping revenue values that is synonymous with PC makers nowadays.
