Dell posted the biggest gains in worldwide server revenue in the second quarter, helping it to nudge Sun Microsystems out of third place, Gartner said Thursday.
IBM retained the top spot but had slower revenue growth than Dell, while Hewlett-Packard stayed in second place with hardly any growth at all, according to Gartner’s estimates.
Dell’s server revenue climbed an impressive 15 per cent from the second quarter last year, compared with 11.5 per cent growth for IBM and 2.9 per cent growth for HP, Gartner said. Sun’s revenue declined 6.8 per cent while Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens stayed flat.
Dell made the most of an upswing in x86 server replacements during the quarter, which was the biggest driver for the market as a whole, according to Gartner. Sales were also lifted by data center build outs and growth in emerging markets.
Server revenue overall grew 5.7 per cent from the second quarter last year, to $13.8 billion, which Gartner called a solid performance given the economic woes in the U.S. and elsewhere.
The results looked different in terms of server units shipped. HP led by that measure with about 30 per cent of the market, down slightly from last year. Dell came second with 22.3 per cent and IBM was third with 13.2 per cent, Gartner said.
IBM’s Unix servers sell in relatively small volumes but at higher prices than x86 systems, which explains why it came first in revenue but third in shipments. Sun and Fujitsu took fourth and fifth place, growing server unit shipments 1.6 per cent and 3.3 per cent, respectively.
Unit shipments of servers based on Intel’s Itanium processor fell 7.9 per cent, although revenue climbed 9.4 per cent, meaning higher-end systems are driving the sales of Itanium servers, Gartner said.
Overall the vendors sold 2.3 million servers during the quarter, up 12 per cent from the same period in 2006.
