Dell surprises with server growth

HP and IBM continue to battle for leadership in the server market, while Dell has turned in the surprise of the quarter with the biggest growth of any of the major server vendors.

IBM achieved most revenue with $3.87bn (£1.95bn) for the three months from April to June and 29.8 percent market share, according to the latest statistics from analyst firm Gartner. HP scored $3.7bn in revenue with 29.5 percent market share. HP is growing faster with 9.2 percent market share growth in the quarter against 6.5 percent for IBM.

But even though it is raking in the most income, IBM is being beaten on volume. Its shipments fell from 315,511 in the same quarter last year to 295,088. Those figures saw IBM remain in third place in shipments behind HP in first place with 650,371 shipments. Dell is still in second place with 464,650.

Dell had much to smile about in the quarter rising from fourth to third in terms of revenue with growth of 19.6 percent in the quarter. But its growth in shipments was not as spectacular — it was behind HP with 7.3 percent shipment growth.

Sun lost out on shipments with a decline of 11.4 percent as they dropped to 95,000 from 107,000 in the previous quarter.

"There were a number of dynamics that affected the market, but the x86 server area was the real growth contributor," said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner. "A strong underlying demand for increased capacity and new applications is driving volume growth despite potential inhibitors like virtualisation and economic concerns.

"RISC-Itanium Unix servers continued to be constrained," Hewitt said. "In this segment, shipments fell 18 percent and revenue fell 1.5 percent for the quarter."