HP captures No. 1 position in worldwide server shipments and revenue for first quarter of 2008

With a 30.1% total unit shipment share and 29.6% vendor revenue share, HP maintained the No. 1 volume position and took over revenue leadership with support from its HP ProLiant, Integrity and BladeSystem lines. HP ProLiant has led the x86 server market during every quarter reported by Gartner.

In addition, HP claimed the top spot in worldwide x86, Intel Itanium and blade server units and revenue. HP also led in the combined units and revenue for UNIX, Microsoft Windows and Linux-based servers.

HP grew UNIX revenue more than twice as fast as its closest competitors combined and had strong UNIX growth in both India and China as these markets build out their infrastructures.

The Enterprise Storage and Servers unit, responsible for 17% of HP's income in the second quarter of fiscal 2008, recorded 4% year-over-year growth with revenue of $4.8bn. This achievement was driven by a 68% gain in HP BladeSystem server sales.

The blades market continues to ramp quickly as both enterprise and midsize customers adopt the technology. Gartner's figures show that HP held 52.9% vendor revenue and 46.3% units shipped for the first quarter of calendar year 2008.

Businesses are relying on Integrity server blades, including the recently announced HP Integrity BL870c, to lower the costs of powering their large, business-critical and memory-intensive workloads. Additionally, thousands of enterprise and midsize customers have embraced the award-winning HP BladeSystem c-Class design to accelerate their business growth and keep their infrastructure costs in check.

"With significant performance, energy usage and cost advantages over the competition, it is clear why customers continue to choose HP servers to manage their growing workloads," said Fawwaz Qadan, Enterprise Storage and Servers Director, HP Middle East. "HP offers the broadest server portfolio in the industry developed for a variety of market segments that each have distinct computing needs."

Additional details and highlights from the first quarter of calendar year 2008 include:

• In the worldwide blade server market, HP extended its No. 1 position, growing its total blade revenue by 111.7% and units shipped by 60.7% year over year. HP's blade revenue share is nearly double that of its closest competitor.
• Growing significantly faster than the x86 server market overall in revenue, HP saw increased success with its ProLiant family of servers, with x86 revenue increasing 13.5% year over year. HP led the x86 server market with 35.3% revenue share and 30.9 percent shipment share.
• HP maintained its No. 1 position in combined Windows, Linux and UNIX server unit shipments and vendor revenue, with 30.2% and 32.9% share, respectively.
• HP grew Linux server vendor revenue by 18.1% and unit shipments by 9.6% year over year to remain the No. 1 Linux server vendor worldwide.
• With increased demand for HP Integrity and HP Integrity NonStop servers in the first quarter, HP grew Itanium processor-based server revenue by 24.4% year over year.
• HP maintained its No. 1 position in both revenue and vendor units shipped in the highly competitive x86-64 processor-based server market segment. HP shipped 2.3 times and 18.4 times more servers than its closest competitors, leading in both Intel and AMD x86-64-based servers.