Worldwide server shipments for the second quarter of 2006 increased 12.8% over the same quarter last year, while worldwide server revenue for the same period grew 2.5%, says Gartner.
Worldwide server revenue totalled $12.4 billion for the quarter, as worldwide server shipments reached two million units, Gartner says.
"The two server categories that exhibited the greatest strengths were x86 and blade servers," says Jeffrey Hewitt, research director at Gartner. "X86 servers and x86 blade servers continue to be the systems of choice for growing the front and middle tiers of the Web infrastructure.
"RISC-Itanium Unix servers grew 1.8% in shipments for the quarter, but dropped a more significant 2.6% in revenue," Hewitt says. "This segment continues to be hotly contested on a global basis, but suffered from constrained revenue overall in the second quarter."
IBM continued to lead the worldwide server market based on revenue. It also increased its shipments by 13.8%, which allowed it to gain one-tenth of 1% of worldwide server shipment share for the quarter. IBM retained its overall blade server lead in revenue and shipments as its blade server shipments increased 45.4% in the quarter, says Gartner.
In server shipments, HP dropped 0.1% in share, but it retained its worldwide server shipment lead and extended the share gap between it and second-place Dell by just over two percentage points. HP`s year-over-year shipment growth was 12.5% in total. Its overall revenue was down 3.8% for the period.
Sun Microsystems posted significant annual growth in shipments and revenue for the period - 13.1% and 13.7% respectively. The only other global vendor to have growth in the second quarter for revenue and shipments was Fujitsu/FSC. Dell did manage to increase server shipments by 2.3% over the same quarter last year, but it experienced a drop in server revenue of 1.8% for the same period.
Closer to home
Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) server shipments in the second quarter of 2006 increased 9% over the same quarter last year, while server revenue declined by 0.1%, says the research firm.
Server revenue totalled $3.9 billion for the quarter and server shipments reached 585 000 units in EMEA.
"The two server categories that showed the strongest shipment growth were x86 and blade servers, which grew 10.4% and 61.4% respectively," says Adrian O`Connell, principal research analyst at Gartner. "RISC-Itanium servers had a difficult quarter with shipments decreasing 3.1% and revenue dropping 5.1%."
Geographically, Eastern Europe saw its server revenue increase by 1%, while server revenue in Western Europe grew at under 0.5%. With revenue declining by 6%, the Middle East and Africa region was the weakest performer in the second quarter of 2006.
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