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By Stephen Shankland, 25 February 2003 11:36

NEWS Big Blue has maintained its 'King of the Castle' status in the server market, with Dell also managing to wrestle market share away from Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems in 2002. Overall it was a grim year in the server world - overall sales dropped eight per cent to $43bn, or about £26bn, a new study said. IBM maintained its top ranking in the market, with a two per cent decrease in revenue to $13.4bn but a 2.1 per cent gain in market share from 2001 to 2002, according to new figures released by Gartner. Big Blue, which holds 31.1 per cent of the overall market, made gains in Unix servers, Intel servers and Linux servers. The server market, which had been growing by leaps and bounds during the internet buying spree in the late 1990s, has been struggling with an economic recession and deep pricing discounts. Dell, in fourth place in the overall market, was the only competitor in the top four whose sales increased from 2001 to 2002. Its revenue grew six per cent from $3bn to $3.2bn, while its market share grew one per cent to 7.5 per cent. In second place HP saw its revenue decrease 13 per cent to $11bn and its market share drop 1.4 per cent to 25.2 per cent. Third place Sun's revenue dropped 10 per cent to $6.5bn, and its market share dropped 0.3 per cent points to 15.1 per cent.