While worldwide server shipments grew 1.4 percent over the second quarter of 2011, with revenue declining 2.9 percent over the same period, the EMEA region saw far worse results as the European economy continued to falter.
Gartner analyst Jeffrey Hewitt said, "In terms of revenue growth, only Asia/Pacific and the United States produced growth for the quarter, all other regions declined."
In shipments the US saw an 8.4 percent increase, and revenue growth stood at 6.5 percent for the period.
In EMEA server shipments totalled more than 585,000 units in the second quarter of 2012, a decrease of 4.4 percent from last year. Server revenue totalled $3.3 billion in the second quarter but this was a big drop of 11.6 percent from last year.
As in the first quarter of 2012 Dell continued to be the only top-five vendor to achieve revenue growth, with the other four suffering declines.
Total worldwide server revenue stood at $12.85 billion for the second quarter, with world shipments totalling 2.36 million. In world and European markets HP still leads the pack in terms of shipments and revenues.
Breaking down the movement in world figures Gartner said that in terms of x86-based server form factors, blade servers rose 1.1 per cent in shipments and 7.3 percent in revenues for the quarter. The x86-based rack-optimised form factor fell 3.1 per cent in shipments, but climbed 3.1 percent in revenues for the second quarter.
In the EMEA region, the "other CPU segment", which primarily covers mainframes, showed the weakest result, with a 37.1 percent year-on-year decline. "The market's general weakness was compounded by a cyclical low in terms of the life cycle of products", said Gartner.
The RISC/Itanium Unix segment was also very weak, said Gartner, with a 25.1 percent decline, as "migration away from Unix platforms continued".
But despite the overall Unix weakness, Gartner said IBM continued to do well, with its share of all RISC/Itanium Unix revenue increasing to nearly 53 percent.
In EMEA, the x86 segment, although less weak than the others, also declined, with revenue down by 2.9 percent.