Gartner revises its first-quarter numbers and finds that IBM actually beat out Hewlett-Packard in server revenue.Gartner has handed the server revenue crown back to IBM.
On July 3, Gartner
issued a statement that revised its server revenue numbers for the first
quarter of 2008. The findings now place IBM
in the No. 1 spot and Hewlett-Packard has been pushed down to second place,
although HP shipped more units than any other system vendor.
For the quarter, IBM’s worldwide server
revenue remained $3.9 billion, but Gartner revised its numbers and reduced HP’s
estimated revenue sales from $4 billion to $3.8 billion. The numbers for the
other top server vendors—Dell, Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu/Fujitsu-Siemens—remained
the same.
Gartner’s server shipment number remained the same. HP shipped more than
680,000 servers during the quarter, while IBM
shipped about 302,000 systems. The numbers for the other vendors also remained
the same.
In a statement, Gartner offered a vague explanation for why it changed the
numbers in favor of IBM. The research firm
also indicted that overall revenue only increased 2.5 percent instead of the
4.3 percent it originally calculated. Now, Gartner estimates server revenue for
the first quarter topped $13.3 billion worldwide instead of $13.6 billion.
“We commented in the previous release that HP and IBM
continue to vie for market leadership in the worldwide server market based on
revenue,” according to a Gartner statement. “This is still the case but the
updated data shows that IBM maintained the
No. 1 vendor position in worldwide server revenue in the first quarter of
2008.”
The latest release will likely add to the rivalry between HP and IBM,
as both companies look to dominate the server market. It also shows the
difficulty of trying to calculate how much revenue each company actually
receives from the sale of a single server and what sort of value the vendors
add to each unit as it leaves the factory floor.
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