Compaq leads the growing server market

According to a report by the Gartner Group, Compaq led the way with a 27.1 per cent market share and unit shipments surpassing the one million mark. Compaq was chased into first place by IBM's market share of 16.7 per cent and Dell's 14.6 per cent.

Sun Microsystems and Dell showed the strongest unit increases with growth rates of 61 and 42 per cent respectively.

The growth was attributed to ebusiness demand for front-end web applications and the subsequent need for database servers.

Although the figures indicate that the US server market is bucking economic slowdown trends, a Gartner analyst said in the report that the next two quarters will be critical in assessing the impact of the current economic situation on the server market, due to the length of typical server purchase cycles.