A Gartner report has revealed that the financial services industry, including banks and investment services organisations, was the highest spending vertical market in server revenue in 2006. It accounted for 20% of Asia Pacific server revenue in 2006.

The communications sector generated 14% of Asia Pacific server revenue, while the government sector was the third highest spender with 13% of total server revenue.

"The financial services market is the leader for total IT spending and the server market is no exception, especially in emerging markets like China and India," said Jennifer Wu, research vice president, Gartner. "In 2006, many financial institutions in mature markets like Japan and Australia faced challenges of operational risk management and regulatory requirements, which led to structural changes, which in turn resulted in more server sales."

"Initiatives like application and data consolidation as well as implementing applications like ERP are now going on in the banks. All of these deployments require an investment in IT infrastructure and hence more servers," noted Uko Tian, principal analyst at Gartner in China.

IBM was the leading vendor in the financial services market, accounting for 42% of server revenue in 2006, followed by Hewlett-Packard with 22% market share.