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HP, IBM Top Server Sales

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Hewlett-Packard retained its lead in global server shipments during the second quarter, according to a new report from Gartner, but IBM also retained its lead in revenue from server sales.

HP continues to dominate shipments for servers worldwide, but IBM hangs on to the lead in global revenues.

Overall, according to Gartner, worldwide server shipments increased 2.7 percent from the same quarter in 2006, while revenue rose 5.1 percent year over year. Additionally, worldwide server shipments just slightly exceeded 2 million units and brought in $13 billion for the quarter.

During the second calendar quarter of 2007, HP shipped just over 650,000 servers, an increase of 17 percent over the nearly 556,000 it shipped in the same quarter in 2006. Dell shipped the second most servers—roughly 465,000—in the quarter, a gain of 7.3 percent over last year’s quarter when it shipped nearly 433,000 servers.

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While IBM topped the revenue charts with $3.87 billion in server sales, HP was close behind with $3.7 billion for the quarter. Dell’s server revenues for the same period were $1.56 billion, in fourth behind third-place Sun Microsystems ;at $1.75 billion.

Meanwhile, Sun Microsystems shipped the most servers in the RISC/Itanium processor category, according to Gartner. At the same time, x86-based “commodity” server sales are on the rise. In fact, the difference in cost between RISC/Itanium-based servers and x86-based servers helps account for the revenue disparities.

“The x86 server area was the real growth contributor,” Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner, said in a statement. “A strong underlying demand for increased capacity and new applications is driving volume growth in spite of potential inhibitors like virtualization and economic concerns.”

For instance, in comparison to HP and Dell, third-place IBM shipped 295,000 servers and fourth-place Sun shipped 95,000. Shipment market share for IBM dipped 6.5 percent over the previous year’s quarter, while Sun’s share slid 11.4 percent.

Of the 650,000 servers shipped by HP, 633,000 were x86-based. Dell’s shipments were 100 percent x86-based servers.

At the same time, however, IBM and Sun grew revenue over the year-ago quarter by 6.5 percent and 7.9 percent, respectively, according to Gartner figures.

Indeed, in revenue terms, IBM’s sales of mainframes grew by 5 percent and Unix servers increased by 7 percent, but x86-based servers grew by a whopping 16 percent. Shipments of HP’s ProLiant servers increased 18 percent, and HP Integrity server shipments grew 54 percent, according to the report.

HP’s overall market share for server shipments hit 31.5 percent, followed by 22.5 percent for Dell, 14.3 percent for IBM and 4.6 percent for Sun. In terms of revenue, IBM held 29.8 percent share compared with HP’s 28.5 percent, followed by Sun at 13.5 percent and Dell at 12 percent.

Coming in at fifth in both shipments and sales was Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens with 59,000 servers shipped and nearly $490 million in revenue. In the quarter, it held 2.9 percent share of shipments and 3.8 percent of server revenue.

Article appeared originally on InternetNews.com.

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