If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, the signs of spring finally coming to life are all around – crocuses shooting up from the ground, buds on trees and green lawns. It just so happens, too, that, at this time of the year, we’re seeing stronger signs of new life in the economy and in the IT industry.

Take spending on servers, for example. Even though we haven’t seen first-quarter 2010 results, we at least know that the trend is up. IDC says so, anyway. The analysts recently released numbers that showed revenue from servers in the fourth quarter last year declined 3.9% from 2008, to $13 billion, as shipments rose 1.9% to 1.9 million units. That was the sixth consecutive quarter that revenue fell year over year, according to IDC.

Wait! you may be thinking. That’s revenue loss. How can that be positive? Well, that’s why you should always read the inside of a book before you judge it.

IDC says that the fourth quarter was the second consecutive period of sequential quarter-over-quarter revenue growth, according to an article that I read about the statistics. So, even though things may not be looking so good on a year-over-year basis, it’s looking up for quarter-on-quarter business.

What’s behind the improvements? Apparently, there’s a rebound in spending on volume servers. Spend is up 9.9% year over year. Also, the revenue decline for mid-range servers, priced between $25,000 and $250,000, slowed in the fourth quarter to a drop of 5.3% decline year over year, compared to a 9.5% fall in the third quarter.

IBM is still on top of the server market, leading in the quarter with a more than 35% share. The company, however, saw revenue decline 6.5% year over year. And Hewlett-Packard followed with a 30.5% share, with revenue rising 0.8%. Third-place Dell had a 11.5% share, as revenue grew 4.5% due to an increase in sales to enterprise, public sector, and data-center customers, IDC said, in the article. In fourth-place was Sun Microsystems (recently bought by Oracle). Sun saw a 17.3% drop in revenue, holding an 8% share in the quarter. Of the top five, Fujitsu placed last, with a 7.2% increase in revenue and a 4.6% revenue share figure.

Hopefully, the rise in server spending will maintain its staying power. From where I sit, providing monitoring services to companies, I can definitely report a trend in greater interest for safer, more secure server performance, and I’m confident that will continue, too.

Rarely do I come across blogs or commentary on IT subjects that cut to the heart of the issue, touch on some human aspect and leave out all the technical jargon. To me, that’s the best type of writing of which our industry could use more.

So I must praise Dan Woods, chief technology officer and editor of Evolved Technologist, a research firm focused on the needs of CTOs and chief information officers, for his sharing his personal feelings in a Forbes article about departing with a server he’d been using at his company. Yes, a server, not a puppy or a wife or even a beloved and well-worn college jersey.

It was a Linux box that he’d been using to run his company’s Web site and wiki. “This reclamation ended an important chapter of my life,” says Woods, in the piece.

Aww; what a softie! Woods says that the staff that took his box off the rack “will never know how it hosted a wiki that helped write more than 10 books, and that hundreds of people used the processor, memory and disk during the writing process. The people who strip this server down for parts won’t have any idea that the Web sites powered by this server took my company, Evolved Media, through several stages of evolution.”

Woods says it “pains me in a way to have nothing to say good bye to,” although he acknowledges that, like the Google Apps services he uses, that server, which he bought it in 2006, could very well have become virtual without him knowing. “What this means for a sentimentalist like me is that something important is disappearing,” says Woods. “The range of abstraction is growing. For a technologist, no longer having a specific server is like giving up owning a car and always using a taxi or a car service.”

But wait; there’s a silver lining to Woods’ tale of woe. In exchange for his old server, which went down for a week, he received peace of mind from storing his data on a new Rackspace server.

“As the world becomes more part of the cloud, those of us that did engineer our own computing infrastructure are saying goodbye to a hands-on era,” he says. “I suppose that’s what is really bothering me. I’m no longer controlling the knobs and dials of my server as I once did. There is no thrill to getting it working and keeping it going. Google, MindJet, Rackspace and the other cloud vendors just do all the work for me.”

I highly recommend checking out the full article. I was impressed with how Woods talked honestly about his feelings of loss. He could be any one of us in the IT industry, as we transition from an age of internal servers and IT expertise for building and maintaining servers and networks…to the age of the cloud. “When you finally accept your deeply sentimental and nerdy nature, it becomes OK to voice such thoughts,” says Woods. Bravo!

Saying goodbye to your server, however, does not mean giving up every aspect of control over your computing needs. On the contrary, more control becomes necessary – because it’s out of your hands. Even in today’s cloud environment, vigilance is required over things like uptime, outages, and website transactions. And you need quick, responsive alerts to inform you of brewing trouble.

Cisco’s got something on its mind, and it’s got to do with the cloud.

The company plans to integrate network devices, servers, and storage utilities into a unified, next-generation data center, according to a story I read. Cisco is the leader of the networking market, and so the company’s decision, which it announced earlier this month, creates a turf war with leaders of the server market (both IBM and HP) and IBM on the data storage front.

The past is past. Cisco used to work with HP on servers, but will now market its own servers and its own software to manage all three unified elements of the data center.

The Cloud Influence

The growth of cloud computing is also a factor behind Cisco’s decision, as the cloud is changing how companies store data. Plus, social networks, virtualization, and VoIP have all taken some of the cachet away from IBM and HP when it comes to servers. So, Cisco’s move to integrate the network elements–the servers, and storage–into a unified platform, managed from a single source, is a logical next step, according to Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT Research, who was interviewed in the story.

 ”Over the long haul this could affect large enterprises seeking to deploy clouds on their own or other companies that deliver cloud-based services,” he said.

Looking back, it shouldn’t be a shock to me that Cisco would enter the server market, considering that it bought more than a dozen software app companies over the last couple of years, some of them leading players in the cloud computing market. 

Look out smaller server firms! You’ll have competition on your hands soon enough, as Cisco’s a reliable, great brand, and I think companies would feel pretty safe trusting their data on Cisco servers. Of course, to feel even safer, both large enterprises and SMEs are continuing to rely on server monitoring. There’s too much at risk to trust your data to a server without an independent party looking over their shoulder for signs of trouble.