As per market tracker IDC survey released Thursday, the 2009 first quarter revenues for the server makers witnessed a sharp plunge, largely because of a steep fall in server shipments globally.

The 24.5 percent drop in the server revenues, to $9.9 billion, for the first quarter marks the biggest yearly percentage drop since 1996 - the year in which IDC began tracking server sales. While the revenue figures for x86 servers showed a 28.8 percent decline to reach $5.1 billion; revenue for non-x86 servers - including Unix systems - dropped by 19.4 percent to reach $4.8 billion.

Not only was this fall in revenue the third 'quarterly fall' in a row, but it was also the first quarter in which server revenues plunged below the $10 billion mark.

Furthermore, the IDC survey revealed that the year-over-year worldwide server unit shipments in the first quarter fell 26.5 percent to nearly 1.49 million units - thereby making it the largest unit shipment fall in the last five-year period. While the shipments of x86 servers were almost 1.42 million, the shipments of other types of servers - including those with the IBM Power and Sun Sparc brand processors - were barely 64,450.

The reasons that IDC cited for the first-quarter fall in server revenue as well as shipments were - tightened IT budgets by customers and their holding back on updating server hardware.