Who's the hardware king?

IBM sits atop the heap in most categories, according to results tallied by Gartner for the third quarter 2006.

In other categories, Sun Microsystems continued to come on strong while Hewlett-Packard held its crown.

Overall, worldwide server shipments grew by 9 percent in the third quarter of 2006 compared to the same time last year, the research firm said. Revenues the world over totaled $13 billion for the quarter. Worldwide server shipments reached just over 2 million units.

Jeffrey Hewitt, research director at Gartner, said in a statement that blade servers and x86 servers continue to produce the highest growth levels within the overall market. "Both of these server types show ongoing installation growth at the front and middle of the Web server tiers."

Lines of RISC-Itanium Unix architectures fell by 6 percent in shipments for the quarter, Gartner continued, but grew slightly in revenue at 0.6 percent.

In this Unix space, Sun, IBM and HP retained their positions from the same quarter last year, but their revenue positions reshuffled with IBM taking the lead, Sun in second place and HP in third.

But in total server revenues, IBM lead the worldwide server market at $4 billion, to capture 33.7 percent of the server market. HP, which took in $3.2 billion in the quarter, held on to the number two slot with 25.3 percent.

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Dell kept the third slot with $1.4 billion in revenues, for a 10.8 percent share; Sun nipped at Dell's heels with $1.3 billion, or 10.1 percent.

In server shipments, however, HP surged back to the top, even though it slipped by 0.5 percent in share. The share gap between it and second-place Dell dropped 0.8 percent for the quarter, Gartner said. Overall, HP's year-on-year shipment growth was 7.2 percent in total.

Meanwhile, Sun Microsystems continued to challenge with "significant annual growth in both shipments and revenue for the period," Gartner said, 6.4 and 24.7 percent, respectively.

Other standout stories were Dell, which posted growth in both shipments (10.5 percent) and revenue (10.9 percent), while the No. 5 global vendor, Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens, fell 5.9 percent in shipments and 8.6 percent in revenue for the quarter.