Gartner: IBM Retains Lead In Growing Server Market In 2Q

The U.S. server market was up 3.2 percent at $4.8 billion for the quarter, compared to $4.6 billion last year, said the Stamford, Conn.-based researcher.

Leading the pack was IBM, which during the quarter sold $3.7 billion worth of servers, up 4.6 percent over the same quarter as last year. Number two Hewlett-Packard also did well, with server revenue up 11.9% to reach $3.5 billion. They were followed by Sun Microsystems, which was down 4.5 percent to $1.5 billion; Dell, which saw revenue rise 18.5 percent to reach $1.3 billion; and Fujitsu and Fujitsu Siemens, which dropped 3.0 percent to record revenue of $513 million.

IBM was the top RISC-based server vendor for the quarter, with a strong year-over-year growth of 27.5 percent to give the company a 37.7 percent share of that market segment. It was followed by Sun, which had a 30.7 percent market share, and HP, with a 25 percent market share. Both Sun and HP saw their revenue in this space decline, according to Gartner.

In x86-based servers, HP was the clear leader with a 34.2 percent share of this market segment in the second quarter. It was followed by Dell, which controlled 22.6 percent of this segment, and IBM, which had a 17.3 percent share. x86-based server revenue of both HP and Dell rose by slightly over 18 percent over last year. However, while Sun was at the number six position in x86-based server revenue, it enjoyed the strongest growth of all vendors, with revenue up almost 192 percent over last year thanks to the growth of its Opteron business.

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The Linux segment grew the fastest, hitting revenue of $1.5 billion, up 31.6 percent over last year, said Gartner. However, Windows and Unix continued to battel for the top spot.

Windows-based server revenue was up 7.8 percent, compared to 6.6 percent for Unix-based server revenue. Overall, about 35 percent of server revenue came from Windows-based systems, 34 percent from Unix-based systems, and 12.5 percent from Linux-based systems.

IBM kept its number-one spot in Linux servers with 27.6-percent market share, thanks to a nearly 30-percent growth in revenue. HP was close behind, with a 23.9 percent market share, followed by Dell with a 16.7 percent share.

While Dell's revenue in Linux rose a respectable 32.9 percent to $253 million, number four Sun rose even faster, with revenue growing 171 percent to reach $68 million, Gartner said. But neither could compare to Unisys in growth rate. That vendor made its mark in the Linux server space with revenue of $6.3 million, up about 3,700 percent over the same period last year.

On the Unix side, Sun continued to hold on to the top position despite a drop in revenue of 7.4 percent over last year to reach $1.3 billion. HP was up 6.3 percent to give it second place in this space. IBM, on the other hand, was up 32.8 percent over last year at $1.2 billion.

The blade server business continued to be dominated by IBM and HP, with Dell growing strong to give it a respectable number three spot. IBM sold $177.2 million worth of blade servers, up 78.2 percent over last year. HP, at number two, had blade server revenue of $141.9 million, up 49.3 percent. Dell overtook Fujitsu and Fujitsu Siemens at number three with growth of 362.5 percent to hit revenue of $31.4 million, Gartner reported.