Server shipments up more than seven percent

"The server market exhibited growth for the fourth quarter and for the year as a whole," said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner. "In fact, the fourth quarter climbed almost 11% in shipments and just under 3% in revenues in spite of the fact that there had been concerns about a slowdown due to downturns in certain economic sectors of particular geographies."

"RISC-Itanium Unix servers fell on a global basis for 2007 at 13.8% in shipments but grew 1.7% in revenues for the year," Mr. Hewitt said. "Comparatively, mainframes showed an 11.8% revenues decline which can be attributed to a slow period in the replacement cycle timing for this server class."

IBM continued to lead the worldwide server market based on revenues. The company ended the year with an overall slight increase in revenues (0.8% for 2007). Gartner analysts attribute the company's performance to a 10.2% growth in System x and a 9.1% growth in System p while System z and System i revenues both dropped 9.6% for the year.

Of the top five global vendors, Dell, Hewlett-Packard (HP), IBM and Sun all had revenues increases for the year, while Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens was the only one to have a slight decline.

In server shipments, HP remained the worldwide leader for 2007. Its shipment growth was a solid 16.6%. The ProLiant brand grew 17.2% in shipments for the year while HP Integrity climbed 56.8% and HP NonStop went up 13.8%. All other HP brands declined for the period, which when combined with the gains of the other brands, produced the overall final result.