Worldwide server shipments might have been up 4.4% to 2.3 million units in the September quarter but revenues were down 5.4% to $12.7 billion according to Gartner. IDC's numbers aren't all that different.

It hasn't been this bad since 2002 and IDC for one doesn't expect a rebound this quarter or next year.

The downturn hit x86 ASPs and Unix servers no matter how they're measured. According to Gartner's estimates, RISC/Itanium Unix servers were down 16.1% in shipments and 10.8% in revenue.

According to IDC, x86 server had their deepest year-over-year revenue decline since 2000, falling 6.6%.

One wonders what can be laid to consolidation and virtualization's doorstep.

IBM is still number one in revenues to HP's second place though both were down. HP units, where it's first worldwide, were up 11.4% while Dell was down 2.1%, Gartner says.

Looking at revenues, IBM (30.3%) and HP (29.8%) both increased their market share; Dell (11.8%) was flat. Sun (9.1%) was down almost a point. Fujitsu lost 0.2% to close at 4.8%, by Gartner's measure.

From the point-of-view of units HP has 31.2% market share for which it can thank its blade server. Dell shipments were up 3.3% and Sun's were up 2.9%. IBM's were down 3.5% and Fujitsu's dropped 3.8%.

However, IDC figures IBM revenues were down 3.1% (4.2% by Gartner's count), HP 2% (3.9%), Dell 4.3% (5.2%), and Sun 10.9% (14%).

IBM's mainframe revenues were up 24.8%, according to IDC, because of a fortuitous upgrade cycle that's already budgeted.