ServersServer Shipments and Revenues Jump in Q1: Gartner

Server Shipments and Revenues Jump in Q1: Gartner

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Worldwide, server shipments grew by 8.5 percent to 2.3 million units in the quarter compared with the same quarter in 2010, when the industry shipped 2.1 million units, analyst firm Gartner reported Thursday.

Global server shipments and revenues grew at a healthy clip in the first quarter, according to a new report.

On the revenue side, gains were even higher, with sales growing 17.3 percent over the first quarter of 2010’s results, from $10.8 billion last year to $12.7 billion in 2011.

“X86 servers forged ahead and grew 8.6 percent in units for the year and 17.5 percent in revenue,” Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner, said in a statement.

“RISC/Itanium Unix servers finally exited their slump and grew 5.2 percent in shipments and 20.7 percent in vendor revenue, compared with the same quarter last year,” he added.

HP (NYSE: HPC) led the pack in both shipments and revenues for the quarter, with 687.5 million servers sold for $3.826 billion. In unit share, that reflects a growth rate of 2.3 percent year-over-year. Although HP’s unit share in the market overall was 29.8 percent, however, that was down from 31.6 percent share last year at the same time.

Coming in second in terms of units, Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) shipped 508.7 million servers for a 22 percent share, but that was a slight decline of 0.4 percent from 510.4 million units in the year ago quarter.

IBM (NYSE: IBM), though, held its second place position in terms of revenues with $3.76 billion for the quarter, giving it 29.7 percent market share, up from 28.3 percent last year.

Dell, in comparison, brought in server revenues of $1.893 billion, giving it a 14.9 percent share of revenues overall.

Meanwhile, IBM’s shipment volumes came to only 272 million for 11.8 percent market share.

Much of the disparity has to do with the higher selling prices for IBM mainframes compared to Dell’s commodity servers.

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) was in a similar position to IBM with sales of its Sun SPARC servers at 36.8 million shipments for a 1.6 percent share of unit volume and in fourth place, but with $798.6 million in revenues with 6.3 percent global share of sales.

In contrast, Fujitsu took fourth place for units shipped, with some 76.6 million servers, translating into unit share of 3.3 percent, while only bringing in $592 million in revenues, for a revenue share of 4.7 percent.

Stuart J. Johnston is a contributing editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @stuartj1000.

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