Gartner corrects mistake showing HP as server market leader

A faux pas has been committed at Gartner – in May the market research organisation reported that Hewlett-Packard (HP) had taken top spot in the global server market with sales of $4.01 billion in the first quarter of 2008. This would have been a historic breakthrough for HP, as for years IBM has been top dog for sales in the server sector.

Gartner is now having to back-pedal. New figures and a re-analysis of the data have now shown that HP's sales in the server market in the first quarter of 2008 were just $3.77 billion. This means that they remain in second place with a market share of 28.3 per cent, compared to IBM's 29.4 per cent. According to Gartner, sales growth at HP compared to the first quarter of 2007 was not the 10.3 per cent previously reported, but a much more modest 3.8 per cent. Gartner has also corrected the rate of growth for the server market as a whole from 4.3 per cent to just 2.5 per cent. According to Gartner, the figures for IBM, Dell, Sun, Fujitsu Siemens Computers and other vendors remain unchanged.

Gartner competitor IDC also placed HP at the head of the server market rankings in late May, albeit with significantly differing figures. Their figures have not, at least not yet, been corrected. IDC calculated that there had been a 3.5 per cent increase in the total server market and that HP had achieved sales growth of 4.2 per cent (both compared to the first quarter of 2007). On the basis of the Gartner figures, HP issued a press release, crowing over its success.

This comes just days after market research organisation iSuppli issued significant corrections to its figures showing the market shares of AMD and Intel in the micro-processor sector. Whilst in April, it reported that Intel had achieved a slight increase in its share of the CPU market in the fourth quarter of 2007 compared to the third quarter of 2007, up from 78.8 to 78.9 per cent, iSuppli has since produced new figures showing that Intel's market share actually decreased by around 0.3 per cent during this period.

(trk)