A quarterly report from research firm IDC has revealed that factory revenue in the worldwide server market declined 30.1 percent year-over-year to $9.8 billion in the second quarter of 2009.

This is the fourth consecutive quarter of revenue decline and the lowest quarterly server revenue since IDC began tracking the server market on a quarterly basis in 1996.

The report said server unit shipments declined 30.4 percent yearover-year in second quarter of 2009, accelerating from the 26.5 percent decline experienced in first quarter 2009 and representing the largest ever year-over-year quarterly server unit decline as customers continued to defer server refresh activities.

“Fewer servers have been shipped over the past four quarters than at any time since 2005 and it is clear that the worldwide server installed base is aging rapidly,” Matt Eastwood, group vice president of enterprise platforms at IDC, said in a statement.

“In the weeks and months ahead, IDC believes that IT customers around the globe will begin to focus on the future once again, making strategic compute platform decisions for the next business cycle, and driving more predictable server demand as market conditions stabilize in the second half of 2009,” he added.

For hardware vendors, IBM held onto its number 1 spot in the worldwide server systems market with 34.5 percent market share in factory revenue for second quarter of 2009 and gaining 1.8 points of share in the quarter on the performance of System x and System p.

HP maintained the number 2 spot with 28.5 percent share for the quarter, on a 30.4 percent year-over-year revenue decline.

Dell and Sun held the number 3 and 4 market positions with 12.4 percent and 10.0 percent factory revenue share respectively. Dell’s factory revenue declined 26.8 percent and increased its market share by 0.6 points year over year while Sun’s factory revenue declined 37.2 percent year over year.

Fujitsu/Fujitsu-Siemens maintained its fifth-place standing in terms of factory revenue, with 3.5 percent market share in the quarter.

Among server software vendors, Windows servers accounted for the single largest segment of spending, by operating system, in the worldwide server market. Microsoft Windows server revenue was $3.7 billion in second quarter 2009, showing a 27.7 percent year-over-year decline and comprising 38.1 percent of all server revenue in the quarter.

Linux server revenue declined 28.9 percent year-over-year to $1.3 billion in the quarter. Linux servers now represent 13.8 percent of all server revenue, up slightly from 13.5 percent a year ago.

Unix servers, on the other hand, experienced a 30.9 percent revenue decline when compared with second quarter of 2008. Worldwide Unix revenues were $3.1 billion for the quarter, representing 31.5 percent of quarterly server spending.