The integrated infrastructure and platforms market in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) recorded vendor revenue of $541,7-million in the first quarter of 2014 (1Q14), up 57% over the same period one year ago.
The market generated nearly 180 petabytes of new storage capacity shipments during the quarter, which was up 90% year over year.
The portion of Western Europe sales in EMEA has remained stable at about 85% with Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (CEMA) capturing the remaining 15% of EMEA market value in the first quarter of 2014. Middle East and Africa (MEA) was the fastest growing region with revenue increasing 136% year over year thanks to several large Integrated Infrastructure projects.
The market penetration grew across all the main Western European markets, although at a different rate across countries: the UK and Germany remained stable at the top while France registered a weaker sales increase, as expected given the country’s lacklustre performance in the hardware sector.
Meanwhile, the Rest of Western Europe group increased its share, reflecting ramping up adoption in other emerging markets beside the more mature Nordics and the Benelux.
“The less cost-sensitive enterprise segment has proved once again appreciative of the large operational savings brought about by integrated systems, which, coupled with quick time of deployment and easy support, is often cited as the main purchase driver by users.
“However, with new opportunities opened up by wider data availability, enterprises are increasingly turning to integrated systems to support their big data and cloud projects,” says Silvia Cosso, senior analyst, IDC Western Europe Storage.
“Nevertheless, the high price point and the presence of legacy systems can slow down adoption in Western Europe, especially across SMB as well as in more conservative markets.”
“Many data centres in emerging markets are greenfield deployments due to lower dependency on legacy solutions compared to developed countries. Building the IT project from scratch provides an opportunity to implement new technologies and address business requirements for scalable, reliable, and virtualised data centres through integrated systems,” says Jiri Helebrand, research manager, IDC Servers, Systems & Infrastructure Solutions, CEMA.
