Worldwide computer server market reached 12.1 billion US dollars in the first quarter of 2005, up 5. 3 percent year over year, IDC said on Friday.

IDC, a US high-tech market research firm, said worldwide server unit shipment grew 13.5 percent in the first quarter, but the growth rate was the lowest in two years.

IDC found that Linux servers posted their eleventh consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, with year over year revenue growth of 35.2 percent and unit shipments up 31.1 percent.

"Customers continue to expand the role of Linux servers into an ever increasing array of workloads in both the commercial and technical segments of the market," IDC said in a statement.

Microsoft Windows servers also showed strong growth, as revenues and unit shipments grew 12.3 percent and 10.7 percent respectively year over year.

But Unix servers revenue growth slowed down to 2.8 percent while unit shipment growth rate was at 5 percent in the first quarter.

IBM held on to its top ranking as HP moved into a statistical tie for number 1 in the worldwide server systems market with 28.3 percent and 27.6 percent factory revenue share respectively.

Dell and Sun tied for third place in factory revenue with 10.8 percent and 9.9 percent share respectively.

This is the third consecutive quarter that Dell and Sun have been within one point of market share as Dell experienced 16.6 percent year over year revenue growth while Sun's revenues increased 2.7 percent.

In terms of unit shipments, HP maintained its number one position worldwide with 30.4 percent server shipment share, followed by Dell with 24.5 percent share.

Source: Xinhua