"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 virtualization and economic concerns.”

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

IBM continued to lead the worldwide server market based on revenue (see Table 1). It had increases for the quarter in System p (7 percent), System x (16 percent) and System z (5 percent), while it experienced declines only in System i (-14 percent), which combined to produce an overall revenue increase of just under 7 percent for the quarter and boosted IBM’s revenue share 0.4 percent. IBM’s shipments fell just under 7 percent for the quarter, and it lost just over 1 percent of shipment share on a worldwide basis.

In server shipments, Hewlett-Packard grew just over 17 percent compared with the second quarter of 2006, and retained its worldwide server shipment lead. The share gap between it and second-place Dell increased almost 3 full percentage points for the quarter (see Table 2). HP finished the quarter with almost a 32 percent shipment share for the period. HP’s ProLiant product line showed a shipment increase of 18 percent, and HP Integrity grew 54 percent. HP’s remaining brands declined for the period. HP’s overall server revenue climbed 9 percent for the quarter which pushed its second-place revenue share upward just over 1 percent for the quarter.

Dell returned to shipment growth for the quarter and grew just over 7 percent, and gained 1 percent in share. In addition, Dell had the strongest revenue growth of the global vendors for the quarter at almost 20 percent, which produced a revenue share increase of just over 1 percent year-on-year.

Sun posted a decline just over 11 percent in server shipments and lost almost 1 percent shipment share for the second quarter, but it produced an almost 8 percent server revenue increase which resulted in a share gain of 0.4 percent in server revenue share.

Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens grew more than 14 percent in shipments and grew its shipment share 0.3 points; it fell just under 5 percent in server revenue and lost 0.4 percent in worldwide server revenue share.

The blade server segment pushed ahead again in the quarter. Worldwide blade server shipments grew just under 14 percent. HP retained its lead in this segment with the most-significant shipment increase at 73 percent compared with the same quarter last year.

Gartner