Despite of Intel's claims about the Itanium being an industry standard, HP has recently captured 90% of the Itanium server market, to nobody's surprise that big share of the market is only comprised of a few thousand servers, 7,200 to be exact. You would think that someone controlling the market for an industry standard would be selling hundreds of thousands of machines but the fact is the entire Itanium market is currently below the 10,000 units mark. The second place contender, SGI, sold only 230 Itanium servers, and in third place was NEC with 186.
To the Itanium's credit, that 7,200 did go a long way, to the tune of $512 Million in sales. With a recent huge investment into the Itanium by many big players, it's a wonder how long these companies will wait on the CPU before grabbing what money they still can and run away.