Worldwide server shipments grew 14.2% to 2.2 million units for the third quarter of 2010, compared to the same period last year and worldwide server revenue for the same period increased 15.3% to $12.3bn, according to a study by IT research and advisory firm Gartner.
Of the top five global vendors, HP and Dell revenue grew by more than 20% for the quarter while Oracle revenue decreased by 2.6%.
HP held the highest market share revenue in the worldwide server market with 32.1%, a lead of 1.9% over second-place IBM.
IBM server vendor revenue declined to 30.2% to $3.7bn, compared to same quarter last year, and Dell gained the third spot with a market share of 14.6%, followed by Fujitsu and Oracle with market share 4.7% and 6.2%, respectively.
In server shipments, HP retained the top spot with a market share of 32.6% in the third quarter of 2010, and Dell server shipments increased 22.9% to 501,593 compared to same period last year.
IBM held the third spot with 13.1% market share, followed by Fujitsu and NEC with 3.4% and 1.7% market share, respectively, Gartner said.
Gartner research vice president Jeffrey Hewitt said the third quarter produced some solid year-over-year growth globally in both shipments and vendor revenue.
"As in the first half of this year, x86-based servers were the main driver of the market; they grew 14.9% in units and 29.5% in revenue in the third quarter of 2010 and also following earlier trends, the x86-based server market provided an increase in average selling prices from more robust server configurations to accommodate virtualisation," Hewitt said.
"The ‘Other’ CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, also added to the revenue increase for the quarter with growth of 9.9% and RISC/Itanium Unix servers remained in a slump with drops of 10.1% in shipments and 9.5% in vendor revenue compared with the same quarter last year."