After two weeks of being battered in the public arena over the adware infestation of its consumer laptops and now facing a state investigation, Lenovo received some good news on Tuesday.

The quarterly server industry report from research firm Gartner provided the information.

Lenovo’s server sales – bolster immensely by the acquisition of IBM’s x86 server business – topped $1.1 billion in the fourth quarter. a jump of 743 percent year-over-year.

Hardware shipments surged 250 percent.

Both are far higher than over industry growth data, which also showed a big gain for Cisco.

Overall, the server business grew 2.2 percent in revenue in the quarter and 4.8 percent in shipments. Despite the impact of server virtualization, for the year server ships grew 2.2 percent and revenues edged up 0.8 percent.

“There were several factors that produced the strong growth in the server market in 2014,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner. “On a worldwide basis, hyperscale data center deployments as well as service provider installations drove the x86-based server market upward. Enterprises had less unit growth impact because of the ongoing presence of physical server consolidation through x86-server virtualization. This overall market growth developed despite declines in both mainframe and Unix platforms.”

Gartner rival IDC has yet to report its data, but the numbers seldom vary in significant manner.

Revenue Numbers

Lenovo closed on the $2.1 billion deal for the Raleigh-based x86 business group just in time for the fourth quarter of 2014. And in those three months, Lenovo sold $1.1 billion worth of gear, good for a market share of 7.9 percent. (IBM recognized a $1.5 billion gain from the sale, according to its annual report.)

A year earlier as Lenovo launched its own efforts to become a global server player in Chair Yang Yuanqing’s strategy to make Lenovo less reliant on PCs, Lenovo sold $131 million of equipment, barely good for a blip on the Gartner data screen.

One percent.

The whopping 743 percent gain as calculated by Gartner lifted Lenovo to No. 4 in share:

  • HP, $3.9 billion (1.5 percent growth)
  • Dell, $2.4 billion (17 percent growth)
  • IBM, $1.7 billion (down 51 percent)
  • Lenovo, $1.1 billion (up 743 percent)
  • Cisco, $772 million (up 19.5 percent)

The IBM sales came from its higher-price Power servers that weren’t part of the deal.

Shipments

Lenovo’s growth in servers shipped jumped 250 percent to more than 242,000. That’s good for a 9 percent market share compared to 2.7 percent a year earlier.

The leaders:

  • HP, 642,007 (23.7 percent, down 11 percent)
  • Dell, 529,411 (19.6 percent, up 5 percent)
  • Lenovo, 242,322 (9 percent, 250 percent)
  • Huawei, 117,911 (4.4 percent, up 29 percent)
  • Inspur, 91,444 (3.4 percent, up 43 percent)
  • Others, 1,082,985 (40 percent, down 4.3 percent)

Read more: http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2997118