Hewlett-Packard is the top dog in systems shipped with 463,000; machines with its nameplate accounted for 28.9 percent of the servers which left the factory, while revenue leader IBM came in third, at 14.9 percent. Dell is the number two seller.
The biggest winner of the quarter, however, was number four Sun, which grew its server shipments by 38.4 percent over 2003 (but grew its revenues only 2.9 percent). "Sun has had problems -- it's still reeling from a lot of the decisions made in the dot.com days -- but it had a great quarter," said McLaughlin. He pointed to Sun's success with its Netra line in the telecommunications market, and inroads into the financial space with high-end system, as the drivers for Sun's success.
IBM's third-place ranking in servers shipped -- it put an estimated 239,000 machines in companies during the second quarter -- was a sign of only temporary weakness, said McLaughlin. "IBM didn't have a good quarter because people were waiting for the Power 5 lines," he said, referring to the new processor which debuted in May.
"We should see a lot of sales from IBM in the next couple of quarters," McLaughlin added, because of the demand for P5-based servers and other technologies-- particularly it's virtualization engine that lets users slice and dice each physical processor into as many as 10 "virtual" machines -- start showing up in the sales column.
"Absolutely, IBM has a leg up here," said McLaughlin.
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