Marking its 20th consecutive quarter of server shipment leadership, HP once again was No. One in total server units shipped, according to first calendar quarter 2007 server market figures released today by industry analyst firm IDC.

HP grew overall server shipments by 16.6 per cent in the first quarter, growing faster than the top 10 vendors in the worldwide server market. Driven by strong growth across its ProLiant, Integrity and BladeSystem families, HP captured 33.6 per cent shipment share in the first quarter, shipping more than one out of every three servers in the world. These strong results were underscored with the fact that HP again tied for No. One in worldwide Q1 server factory revenue for the third year in a row.

In addition, HP maintained its commanding lead as the No. One x86 server vendor, showing continued leadership as the No. One blade server vendor in the first quarter with 45.1 per cent total shipment share, a year-over-year growth rate of 84.9 per cent. Fuelled by impressive market acceptance of the HP BladeSystem c-Class architecture and the use of blades in the high-performance computing market, HP took more than five points of sequential market share at the expense of IBM and Dell in the first quarter and outpaced the worldwide blade server market as a whole.

“Today’s results from IDC demonstrate HP’s formidable strength as a technology provider and confirm that we’re meeting and exceeding customer needs,” said Mark Hudson, vice-president of marketing, enterprise storage and servers, HP. “The strong growth in ProLiant, Integrity and BladeSystem shows not only the breadth and value of our portfolio, but also the strong customer acceptance from mid-sized businesses through large enterprises and high-performance computing customers.”