Resellers surviving on hardware run rates should take notethat IDC has forecast a dramatic downturn in the fortunes of the UKserver market this year, with SMEs and large enterprises spending even morecautiously than first anticipated.
The analyst reckons UK server revenues will drop 27%this year and shipments will tumble 16%, as all industries led by the bankingand manufacturing sectors hold on tight to their wallets.
“Based on our data in the first quarter we anticipate amassive drop in the market this year,” Nathaniel Martinez, IDC programmedirector for European server research told MicroScope.
Virtualisation was compounding the general slowdown incorporate sales as “the rate of deploying new servers when implementing virtualisationis getting lower and lower”, he said.
Other corporate and SME customers were freezing spendingplans and lengthening upgrade cycles, the analysts added and sales across allform factors including blades would be down this year.
Customers continued to focus on core virtualisation projectswith some pull through for servers and storage, said Mike Rodwell, commercialdirector at Computacenter but he agreed all were spending more cautiously.
“In the current climate we are seeing any discretionaryspend kept to a minimum and new projects are going through significantdiligence internally before they are approved,” he added.
The numbers forecast by IDC resonated with Tom Kelly, UK managingdirector at Logicalis.
“I think the industry will need to accept that for thiscalendar year the market will be about 20% down and cost bases will need to bemanaged accordingly,” he said.
Last month, Greg Davis, head of Dell global partner networksaid resellers that would succeed are those with skills in selling solutionsaround virtualisation, power and cooling, security or recovery and back-up.
“Those solutions show strong ROI and right now if customersare going to spend money they are looking for very solid ROI,” he said.
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