HP Leads Server & PC Segments

Hewlett-Packard Company (HPQ - Analyst Report) has retained its leadership position in the Server segment for calendar year 2010.

The data published by the leading market research firm IDC claims that HP accounted for around 39.0% of the total x86 server revenue for 2010. The company’s revenue from the x86 servers grew 34.0% year over year. Moreover, the company has remained glued to the number one position in the x86 server markets for 59 straight quarters.

Hewlett-Packard also grabbed market share from the EPIC/RISC Blade server market, which improved 20.8% on a year-over-year basis in the fourth quarter of 2010. Leading companies have chosen HP over any other server vendor, as the technology major follows a stringent quality control procedure for all its products.

Many industry experts believe that there would be a major development in the SQL Server universe in 2011. Some are also of the opinion that the SQL Server market is expected to face fierce competition from Microsoft  Corp. (MSFT - Analyst Report) in the cloud, as many companies are moving from traditional servers to virtualization technology and the increasingly popular self-service business intelligence tools. So, demand for servers is expected to be positively influenced in the current year.

A few weeks back, IDC also rolled out the fourth quarter data for PC shipment. HP emerged a winner in this segment as well, with its overall Personal Computer shipments rising 2.7% year over year to 92 million,during the fourth quarter. On the other hand, Desktop sales were somewhat dampened by the demand for Apple Inc.’s (APPL) iPad.

IDC was of the opinion that new PC sales rose in the fourth quarter was not as strong as expected. The research firm also cited weak consumer demand, particularly in the U.S., as another reason for PC sales not meeting its expectation.

The market research firm also stated that total PC shipments in 2010 reached 346.2 million, up 13.6% year over year.

Clearly, HP has retained the leading position in both PC and Server segments. Although we remain positive about the company’s performance going forward given an improvement in demand, intense competition from other big technology companies, such as Cisco Systems (CSCO - Analyst Report), Apple, Microsoft, Google Inc. (GOOG - Analyst Report), as well as smaller Asian players keep us concerned.

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