Worldwide server shipments were up 1.4% in Q2, according to Gartner, but paid less. Revenues were off 2.9%.

HP, which sells more servers than anybody else, was down 5% on both shipments and revenues.

Server ships in the US were up 8.4% bringing in revenues up 6.5%.

Gartner blames delayed buying ahead of new introduction and spending constraints. IBM, for instance, just brought out its new System zEC12 mainframes this week and new Unix boxes are coming. One can't help but wonder if virtualization is also having an impact.

Gartner is expecting a return to single-digit growth.

IDC was more negative.

By its count vendors shipped two million servers, down 3.6%, the first shipment decline in three years. Revenues were down 4.8% to $12.6 billion. Industry-standard servers were off 7.6% at the high end ($250,000 or more) and 11.2% in the mid-range. Counting all sizes, 1.9 million x86 units moved, down six-tenth of a point, bringing in revenues up 3.5%.

Blades did best. Apparently Cisco's UCS blade servers were in demand. It got 13.8% of the market, passing Dell at 8.1% and nearly catching IBM at 15.9%. HP had 51.5% share.

Revenues across all species of blades - x86, RISC, Itanium - were up 6.3% to $2.1 billion on shipments up 4.1%.

HP and IBM were statistically tied with HP sales down 5% to $3.73 billion and IBM down 8.2% to $3.68 billion. The same thing happened last year, with IBM slightly ahead.

Dell came in third with $2 billion in sales, up 5.9%. Oracle's server sales fell 20.1% to $752 million ahead of the introduction of its Sparc T5 gear. Gartner, by the way, which says customers are leaving both HP and Oracle, estimated Oracle's Unix server revenue dropped 31.9% and HP Unix server revenue fell 29.1% on shipments down 5.2% and 31% respectively.

Linux servers weighed in with for $2.8 billion in revenues in the quarter, up 1.7%. Unix systems dropped 20.3% to $2.3 billion. IBM's AIX systems sales dropped 10% but Big Blue was still able to claim a 6.1 point gain in market share because HP and Oracle were worse off, a situation HP can in part at least thank Oracle for. Windows machines brought in $6 billion in sales, up three-tenths of a point.