Chris Ward, IDC Asia Pacific servers and workstations market analyst, said this quarter's growth rate was a slow-down on last quarter's 20 percent, because most of the vendors are trying to sell more higher-value, two- and four-way systems.

Local enterprises spent US$130 million in Q2 which is normally a stronger quarter, Ward said.

The significant stand-out was Sun which was the only Unix server vendor to grow its revenue - by more than 30 percent.

"Sun went well in the Unix [Solaris on Sparc] server space and was the only Unix vendor to grow in revenue while IBM and HP did not," Ward said.

Ward said that since Sun launched its galaxy range of x86-64 systems its business has been the fastest growing in that space at 83 percent, but it is coming off a small base and is still languishing at number five in terms of x86 units shipped.