HP knocked IBM out of the top server spot in revenues with $3.4 billion and 31.5 percent of market share, according to Gartner’s new market share report.
And HP is claiming that it’s selling more servers because of its converged infrastructure story, its broad product portfolio and because it’s HP (which) “allows us to win hands down,” says Jim Ganthier, HP’s vice president of marketing, HP Industry Standard Servers.
Gartner says that overall global server shipments grew 23 percent year-over-year in the first quarter while revenues rose a modest 6 percent. However, x86-based server shipments were up 25.3 percent, and revenues shot up 32.1 percent.
Regionally, the United States led the way with shipments up 28.6 percent. With HP at number one and IBM at number two, Dell, Fujitsu and Oracle/Sun rounded out the top five vendors, which collectively accounted for 87 percent of the total market. Both Dell and Fujitsu reported higher revenues, while Oracle joined IBM in the negative column, with revenues down 2.1 and 38.7 percent, respectively.
Ganthier tells Channel Insider that its industry-standard server – x86 – revenue was up 54 percent in Q1 and credits the channel for most of that growth. “A large portion of that was the success we had with our channel partners.”
He also credits the server success to the company's converged infrastructure (http://www.channelinsider.com/c/a/Hewlett-Packard/HP-New-Data-Center-Strategy-Strikes-Back-at-Cisco-466495/) strategy which is starting to resonate with the marketplace. Introduced late last year after Cisco rolled out its own data-center architecture (http://www.channelinsider.com/c/a/Commentary/Watching-Old-Friends-Become-Enemies-500642/) and pitted the two long-time collaborators against each other, the strategy is succeeding because it's real and available now.
“We're the only team that can give you an ROI of two months. Imagine what that means to a channel partner (who can tell a customer) we have an infrastructure that can pay for itself in less than a quarter.”
There are other benefits to partnering with HP, including innovation on top of the industry standard. That translates into real world advantages like higher server consolidation ratios – up to 21:1 – compared to the industry average of 15:1. Reducing power consumption and costs is another plus, says Ganthier. HP has lowered power requirements by 96 percent over the last couple of generations of servers.
“It's pretty much a story that can't be beat.” Even better news for the channel, he adds, is that HP has a barrage of products coming out within the next 90 days that will keep the company ahead of the pack and “redefine the data center.
“This year we're celebrating our 20th year as the leader in this space and we have no plans to slow down. It's going to be a very exciting summer.”
Hewlett-Packard 
