Hewlett-Packard Surges in Servers

SAN FRANCISCO Hewlett-Packard(HPQ) continued its conquest of the server market, turning in the strongest growth among the field of competitors in the third quarter, according to the latest industry scorecard.

And while Wall Street is fretting that a souring economic picture might crimp corporate spending on technology, server sales are not suffering yet.

"Any implications from financial market instability were not visible in the server market in the third quarter," said Errol Rasit, an analyst at the industry research firm Gartner, in a statement accompanying Monday's report.

Overall, global shipments of servers during the quarter increased 8.7% year over year, while revenue rose 2.6% to $13.4 billion.

For Palo Alto, Calif.-based H-P, strong sales of industry standard servers based on x86 microprocessors, as well as of the more expensive so-called business critical system servers resulted in impressive revenue and unit growth in the July-to-September period.

H-P captured 28.1% of the server market by revenue, narrowing the gap with IBM(IBM), which was the No. 1 player with 30.1% share. A year ago, IBM had 33.7% share vs. H-P's 25.3%.

Investments that H-P has made in its account coverage and "go-to-market activities" are paying off across the server business, according to Gartner.

H-P boosted its server revenue roughly 14% year over year and its shipments 20%.