The first section of the Computerworld Awards features hardware which includes servers, PCs, mobile devices as well as peripherals like printers and corporate multifunction copiers.

The server sector was buoyant last year with worldwide server revenue in 2005 growing 4.5 percent to US$51.7 billion, while server shipments grew 12.7 percent to 7.6 million units from the previous year, according to Gartner. IDC estimates revenue grew 4.4 percent to $51.3 billion, while shipments grew 11.6 percent to 7 million servers. Although vendors remain enthusiastic about the possibilities in the server sector, Annie Chung, Gartner's principal analyst for enterprise systems, Asia/Pacific, sounded a note of caution. "Based on the forecast update last quarter, the server revenue in Hong Kong is expected to have flat-to-negative growth," she said.

What's hot in servers right now is virtualization with many enterprises having consolidated their server farms they see further gains in virtualizing server resources. Virtualization enables the sharing and pooling of server resources and lowers costs and increase flexibility. Market research company IDC estimates spending around server virtualization will increase to nearly US$15 billion worldwide by 2009,

Power and heat issues are also affecting servers at the processor level. Instead of simply ramping up clock speed, chipmakers are putting more cores on a single piece of silicon to enable more work to be done by fewer power-hungry processors. All the key chip vendors are rolling out multicore processors for servers at all levels.

Blade servers are given their own category in this year's awards. While uptake has been high in the last year or so, Gartner expects more modest gains in the future due to concerns over heating, power and immaturity of the technology. "By 2009, only approximately 16 percent of servers installed worldwide will be in the blade format," says Gartner analyst Jane Wright.