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IBM Tops Server Sales In Q4

IBM led all server manufacturers in sales in the fourth quarter of calendar 2010, according to data released Thursday by market watcher Gartner. The data includes total revenue from mainframe, blade, industry standard and other types of servers.

For the three months ended Dec. 31, IBM posted worldwide server sales of $5.2 billion, up 26.4 percent from the same period in 2009. HP was second in overall sales, with revenue up 12.8 percent to $4.5 billion. Third-place Dell saw sales increase 26.4 percent to $1.9 billion, while fourth-place Oracle suffered a 16.2 percent sales decline, to $806 million.

Revenue was also off for fifth-place Fujitsu, where sales fell 0.5 percent to $560 million. Revenues were up 15.8 percent, to $1.7 billion, for all other vendors. IBM's high-end items, such as the System Z mainframe, helped it grab the top spot, as Big Blue actually trailed HP and Dell when it came to the number of units shipped in the fourth quarter.

HP shipments were up 6.9 percent, to 767,026, while Dell's shipments rose 6.3 percent to 515,274. IBM shipments increased 3.8 percent to 332,254. Overall, worldwide server sales were up 16.4 percent, to $14.7 billion, in the fourth quarter--a fact that Gartner analysts attribute to the introduction of new technologies and companies' need to replace aging hardware.

"2010 was a year that saw pent-up x86-based demand produce some significant growth on a worldwide level," says Gartner research VP Jeffrey Hewitt. "The introduction of new processors from Intel and AMD toward the end of 2009 helped fuel a pretty significant replacement cycle of servers that had been maintained in place during the economic downturn in 2009."

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