HP ProLiant has led the x86 server market in worldwide shipments for the past 50 quarters, as reported by IDC. For the first time since 2003, HP has tied for the lead in x86 server shipments in the Americas region, with a 6.4 percent year over year share gain. With HP ProLiant servers, HP now ships more x86 servers in each region than any other vendor.

"Now more than ever, customers need reliable servers that deliver better performance, improved energy usage and cost advantages", stated Paul Gottsegen, vice president, Industry Standard Servers, HP. "HP offers customers value beyond CPU performance by delivering complete server solutions with powerful management software and maximum return on investment. With each processor refresh, including the upcoming Nehalem Xeon processor from Intel, customers can rely on the fact that HP intends to be the first to ship a complete server solution."

The blade server market continues to ramp quickly as both enterprise and midsize customers adopt the technology. IDC's figures show that within the blade server market HP held 54.8 percent factory revenue and 51.5 percent units shipped for the fourth quarter of 2008.

Organisations continue to migrate to HP Integrity systems from mainframe vendors such as IBM to reduce costs and gain efficiencies in their mission-critical environments.

Additional highlights from the fourth quarter of 2008 include:

• HP maintained its no. 1 position in x86 servers, x86-64 servers, AMD Opteron-based and Intel Itanium-based servers for units shipped, leading in both Intel and AMD x86-64-based servers.
• HP maintained its no. 1 position in combined Windows, Linux and UNIX server unit shipments and factory revenue, with 32.7 percent revenue share and 36.3 percent unit share, respectively.
• With increased demand for HP Integrity and HP Integrity NonStop servers in the fourth quarter, HP grew Intel Itanium processor-based server revenue by 7.3 percent year over year.