U.S. Server Shipments Up 13.8 Percent In 2002

U.S.-based businesses purchased a total of 1.9 million servers in 2002, compared with 1.7 million units in the prior year.

Leading the way in the U.S. market was Hewlett-Packard which, including servers shipped by the former Compaq, sold nearly 507,000 servers in the United States in 2002. That gave the company a 26 percent share of the U.S. server market. HP's shipments for the year were up 4.7 percent from the 484,000 units sold in 2001.

Dell Computer was No. 2, but closed the gap with HP by selling 488,000 servers in the United States, up 22.2 percent, according to Gartner Dataquest. That represented a market share of 25 percent.

IBM was third with 225,000 servers, up 3.8 percent from 2001. Big Blue was followed by Sun Microsystems, which shipped 144,000 servers, up 15.9 percent, and Gateway, which shipped 18,000 servers, a drop of 30.2 percent.

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Last year saw strong growth in the entry-level market, especially for two-way and four-way Intel-based servers selling under $5,000, said Shahin Naftchi, senior analyst covering servers for Gartner Dataquest's Computing Platform Worldwide program.

"This resulted from a bad economy where people were not updating their systems," Naftchi said. "If they needed to buy, the went for less-expensive alternatives. In the midrange space, if people made purchases, they preferred high-end Intel-based servers over Unix servers."

While Dell has been increasing its year-over-year shipments for some time, Sun in 2002 managed a strong recovery. However, said Naftchi, the growth Sun experienced was more a result of comparing 2002 to its poor showing in 2001, when the implosion of the dot-com, telecom and finance markets hit Sun harder than other vendors.

Naftchi said it is hard to predict what will happen in 2003 regarding U.S. server shipments because of the political climate in the Middle East and the possibilities of war there. However, in general, she expects the U.S. market to grow at the modest rate seen for the past few quarters.

In 2003, IBM should continue to lead in total server revenue, HP should see good revenue growth, Dell should continue its steady volume growth with some revenue growth, and Sun should stay flat, Naftchi predicted.

Worldwide, total server shipments rose a modest 4.2 percent to 4.6 million units, Gartner Dataquest estimated. HP was the volume leader, followed by Dell, IBM, Sun and NEC.

Both HP and Dell were quick to release statements claiming victory in the 2002 server wars.

HP officials in their statement bragged about leading the worldwide market share in server shipments and about regaining the No. 1 position in the United States, attributing the results to its Adaptive Infrastructure, customer loyalty, and its full range of products.

Dell officials, on the other hand, said the company would continue its lead in Intel-based server sales, noting that Dell added about 4,600 new PowerEdge server customers to its customer list in the fourth quarter ended Oct. 31, 2002.