By Simon Quicke
29 August 2008
The EMEA server market
has grown in the second quarter fuelled by activity in central and Eastern Europe.
According to IDC’s EMEA
Quarterly Server Tracker, factory revenue in the EMEA server market grew 8.7%
year on year to $ 4.4bn in Q2. Shipments increased by 12.4% to reach close to 700,000
with 95.5% of that total being x86 boxes.
Although the main growth
was in Central and Eastern Europe, with
revenues up 17.8%, the western European markets still managed to produce growth
of 6.8%.
But there was an imbalance between unit and revenue growth
indicating that the x86 server market is feeling the pressures of
commoditisation and price drops.
Earlier this week figures from IDC on the worldwide x86
market showed that the segment had produced its lowest growth levels for six years.
In reference to the EMEA figures Nathaniel Martinez,
director of European enterprise servers at IDC, said that there was a refresh
cycle that saw companies move away from older legacy systems but that was “expected
to moderate”.
He added that technologies including virtualisation, blade
and multicore would continue to grow.
