4 June 2003 Analyst group Gartner has retracted and restated its fourth quarter server sale figures after initially attributing an unlikely 54% revenue rise to Hewlett-Packard. Its revised figures suggest a drop of 16% in HP’s server revenue.

At the same time, the analyst that worked on collating the HP figures has also left and Gartner has since promised an overhaul in the way that it collects its worldwide server revenue data.

The probe into Gartner’s server figures was initiated when a number of vendors questioned the size of the gains by HP, which did not appear to tally with the more moribund results that the systems vendor had reported in its financial reports.

In a note to clients, Gartner said: “We’d like to bring your attention to some adjustments we have made to the US historical data. These adjustments were made to better reflect the relative business performance of a small number of server vendors and more closely align with their announced financial results”.

However, it is not clear where the error occurred. Analysts such as Gartner and IDC work closely with vendors in producing their quarterly market figures.

As a result of the re-evaluation, Gartner has delayed publication of its first quarter figures, but has promised to release them shortly.