IBM and HP Dominated Server Sales Last Quarter

IBM and Hewlett-Packard remained the top two kids on the block in the server business last quarter, according to the latest market share figures from research firm Gartner. But HP dominated a little less than it did a year ago. In a market that grew overall by more than 5 percent to $12.3 billion in revenues and 2.2 million servers sold, HP and IBM were neck and neck on a revenue basis, each accounting for about $3.8 billion, or about 29 percent of the market, followed by Dell, Oracle and Fujitsu. On a unit basis, HP was the undisputed king, selling 693,000 servers, which works out to an average price of about $5,500 each. IBM sold 288,000 at an average price north of $13,000. Dell sold 518,000 servers. For HP, both figures represented year-on-year declines of about 3 percent, and are roughly in line with the results HP reported last week. HP said that sales of industry standard servers, meaning those that run regular Intel chips, were down 4 percent, and business critical servers — the ones that run the exotic Intel Itanium chip — were down 23 percent, thanks in no small part to the ongoing scrap with Oracle.

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