The overall market grew 4.1 percent to $12.3 billion compared with the year-earlier quarter, a rate that was slower than that of each quarter since the second of 2003, according to figures Gartner released Wednesday. Servers are powerful systems used for networked computing tasks such as file storage, e-mail routing and bank account transactions.
IBM kept its place at the top of the heap, with 29.8 percent of the market. But its revenue growth of 1.1 percent was outpaced by No. 2 HP, at 13.1 percent growth and 28.1 percent of the market, and Dell, with 13 percent revenue growth and 10.8 percent of the market.
Sun, which held third place a year earlier, saw server revenue drop 4.2 percent and its market share dip to 9.5 percent, Gartner said.
IBM made gains in the $4.1 billion Unix server market, however, with revenue growth of 12 percent that carried it into the first-place spot, with 30.3 percent share, compared with a third-place finish a year earlier. HP kept the No. 2 spot in Unix, with a revenue decline of 0.7 percent and 28.7 percent share, while former No. 1 Sun slipped to third with a revenue decline of 6.6 percent and 27.8 percent share.