As reported in International Data Corporation’s (IDC’s) EMEA Server Tracker, in the third quarter of 2014 the EMEA server market has continued the strong growth seen in 2Q14 to report $2,99-million in vendor revenue and 541 400 units shipped.
This equates to a positive year-on-year growth of respectively 5,8% and 2,1%.
The third quarter of 2014 also represents the second consecutive quarter that EMEA reported a positive year-on-year growth in unit shipments after several quarters of decline.
The EMEA non-x86 market continued its steady decline in vendor revenue (-25,1% year-on-year) and shipments (-24,2% year-on-year) for 3Q14 as legacy systems refreshes tend to show high levels of seasonality, and new workloads are primarily added on the x86 side.
The x86 market in comparison gained almost seven points in revenue share versus the previous quarter and now accounts for 87,1% of the overall EMEA revenue and all of the growth for 3Q14.
x86 machines exhibited a year-on-year gain in revenue and units shipped of 12,7% and 2,4%, respectively, where the majority of this growth can be attributed to higher levels of adoption seen by rack optimized systems that contributed 58,9% of the vendor revenue in EMEA thanks to year-on-year growth of $187-million (+13,8%) in vendor revenue and 15 600 (+5,7%) units.
Blades and density optimized systems played a lesser role in the growth of the EMEA market reporting a revenue growth of 7,4% and 5,7% year-on-year compared to the strong double digit boosts in the previous quarter. Tower servers are the only segment to suffer negative revenue growth (-11,1%) in the EMEA x86 market in 3Q14, despite their positive growth in terms of units shipped.
“The third quarter is usually the slowest in EMEA as it entails summer months,” says Giorgio Nebuloni, research manager with IDC EMEA.
“It is therefore a positive sign to see sustained spending growth continue across several key geographies including the UK, Russia, the Netherlands, and Germany. We believe this is a combination of next generation, 3rd Platform workloads that continue to boost unit volumes and refreshes driven by consolidation within on-premises enterprise environments. IDC remains on the lookout for signs of a slowdown in 4Q14, as particularly France and Italy appear to have tapered off somewhat in the period.”
“Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (CEMA) server revenue continued on the downward trajectory, declining by 1,6% year-on-year to $705,4-million in the third quarter of 2014,” says Jiri Helebrand, research manager at IDC CEMA.
“While non-x86 servers declined by 17,9% year-over-year in revenue, x86 servers recorded revenue growth of 1,5% despite unit shipments shrinking by 6,8%. A focus on richer configurations as well as increased interest in rack and blade servers were the main contributors to revenue growth.
“The Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) subregion was flat year-over-year, with revenue of $363,5-million. Even though the geopolitical risk in the region remains, several HPC deals in Russia, the Czech Republic, and Hungary helped to keep the CEE server market afloat. The Middle East and Africa (MEA) subregion declined by 3,4% year-on-year in revenues to $342-million, although it comes on the back of a strong quarter in the Middle East one year ago. The African region recorded the strongest annual growth in CEMA, mainly driven by IT investments in Nigeria and Kenya.”
Highlights for EMEA include:
* Non-x86 revenues have continued their steady decline (-25,1% year-on-year). This was driven by CISC servers (-46,9%year-on-year), though all other non-x86 servers have persisted in their slow stabilisation.
* Windows continues to grow its vendor revenue share and is up 1,6 percentage points. Linux has rallied this quarter, however, under the influence of some larger deals, to report a 2,8 percentage point year-on-year increase — the largest operating system gain this quarter.
* Maintaining the top spot, volume servers reported $2,42-billion to the EMEA market and gained 4,8 percentage points on the corresponding quarter in 2013. 3Q14 has not been kind to the high-end enterprise servers as they reported a 30,7% year-on-year decrease in vendor revenue.
* Rack servers were the biggest influence in EMEA for 3Q14, reporting 10,5% year-on-year growth in vendor revenue and 5,7% unit growth to report $1,73-billion in vendor revenue and 292 898 units shipped into the EMEA market for 3Q2014.
