This represents a 7.7 percent increase over the same period last year, the market researcher said on Wednesday. The revenue growth was positive in all regions. In terms of unit shipments, there was a 24.5 percent rise year over year, with 1.6 million units shipped during the quarter.
"We saw increased activity in the x86-64 market, as well as continued strong sales in the low-end server market," Mike McLaughlin, principal analyst for Gartner, said in a statement. The largest segment continues to be the x86-32 CPU server market, which saw 10 percent year-over-year growth in revenue, ringing up more than $5.1bn in the second quarter.
IBM topped the revenue list, with 30.7 percent of the market. It was followed by Hewlett-Packard with 27.3 percent market share and Sun Microsystems with 13 percent. Dell was in fourth place with 9.8 percent share; however, its revenue jumped more than 20 percent compared with the same period last year.
In terms of units shipped during the second quarter, HP led the tally with 28.9 percent market share, followed by Dell at 21.1 percent and IBM at 14.9 percent, Gartner said. Sun, with its 5.6 percent share, saw the highest growth rate: an increase of 38.4 percent over the same quarter last year. Sun benefited from increased demand for its Netra line in the telecommunications industry and for its higher-end severs in the financial industry.
Linux-based servers grew both in revenue and shipments. Linux revenue grew 54.6 percent and shipments increased 61.6 percent over the second quarter of 2003. Linux accounted for 9.5 percent of total overall server OS revenue, while Windows had 34.4 percent of OS revenue globally. Unix revenue continued to fall, Gartner said.
