Server sales fell by five per cent in the first quarter of 2013, with IBM, HP, Fujitsu and, especially, Oracle hard hit. Only Dell among the top five server makers increased sales and market share.
Market leader IBM claimed a 25.5 per cent share of the market as Gartner estimated that its server revenues fell by 13.6 per cent to $3.016bn (£1.996bn). HP sales fell by a similar percentage as it claimed second place with sales of $2.959bn (£1.958bn) and a market share of 25 per cent.
Dell, meanwhile, was the only major manufacturer to enjoy an increase in sales and market share, as its sales grew by 14.4 per cent to $2.124bn (£1.406bn), while Fujitsu saw sales decline by five per cent to $583.2m (£386m).
Oracle, though, was the biggest loser. Having acquired Sun Microsystems in 2009, the recent launch of its Sparc T5 systems came too late to rescue its first quarter. Sales fell by 27.2 per cent to $538.5m (£356.5m), helping it slip from fourth to fifth place with a 4.6 per cent market share.
In terms of unit shipments, HP remained market leader - despite a 15.2 per cent decline - with Dell in second place. HP claimed a market share of 24.9 per cent to Dell's 22.2 per cent.
IBM, which sells disproportionately more expensive, high-end servers, remained in third place with sales of 230,446 servers to claim a market share of 9.9 per cent.
Cisco Systems, meanwhile, enjoyed server unit sales up by 33 per cent to 53,873 to claim a market share of 2.3 per cent.
Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner, claimed that the market was weak globally. "The only regions to post increases were Asia/Pacific and the United States, with Asia/Pacific showing the strongest growth with shipment and revenue increases of 7 per cent and 1.7 per cent, respectively," said Hewitt.
He added: "x86 server shipment growth was flat in the quarter, while revenue increased 1.8 per cent. RISC/Itanium Unix servers declined globally for the period, down 38.8 per cent in shipments and down 35.8 per cent in vendor revenue compared to the same quarter last year. The ‘other' CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, exhibited an increase of 3.6 per cent in worldwide revenue."
