Hewlett-Packard Surges in Servers

Last week, H-P beat Wall Street expectations, delivering a 28% gain in its bottom line during its fiscal third quarter, which encompasses a slightly different time frame from that measured by Gartner.

IBM experienced negative growth in both server revenue and unit shipments, according to Gartner.

The report had some good news for Dell(DELL), which is scheduled to report its fiscal third-quarter results on Thursday. According to Gartner, Dell saw double-digit revenue growth and a slight increase in its market share measured by revenue.

Sun Microsystems(JAVAD) also notched decent revenue growth but experienced a 4.5% decline in unit shipments, which Gartner ascribed to the company's focus on product margin instead of volume.

According to Gartner, the need for additional computing brawn to power corporate data centers and strong demand from emerging economies are driving global server purchases.

These trends, says Gartner, are offsetting the effects of virtualization software made by companies such as VMware(VMW), which allow customers to get more efficiency out of their existing servers rather than buying more hardware.

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