EMEA server sales see full-year slide but x86 shines

Datacentre expansion across Nordics gives kick to x86 revenues in Q4

Sales of servers across the EMEA region shrank another 5.3 per cent to $12.4bn (£7.5bn) for the full 2013 year with x86 sales in western Europe a Q4 bright spot, according to IDC's quarterly server tracker.

Andreas Olah, research analyst for the EMEA enterprise server group at IDC, noted, however, that the final quarter of 2013 saw western Europeans buy $2.1bn-worth of x86 servers - making for annual x86 growth of 5.7 per cent.

Non-x86 server sales by revenue equalled a paltry $710m, down 22.8 per cent on the previous year.

"Large datacentre build-outs by global cloud service providers and social networks accounted for a significant chunk of growth in western Europe. That is most notable in the Nordic region and led to a greater rise in shipments than revenues, due to large deals of commodity servers at low prices from Asian original device manufacturers as well as major server vendors," Olah said.

The decline in unit terms for the whole server market was smaller, at 2.7 per cent, with more than 2.2m server units shipped in 2013.

Several other countries that had seen larger shipments to "mega-datacentre" customers in the previous year actually saw a decline this year, including the Netherlands, Ireland and Belgium. Overall, the western European server market shrank 3.5 per cent in 4Q13 from the same quarter in 2012, he said.

"Strong growth was also observed in Greece and Portugal as these previously declining markets have started to pick up again. Moderate rises were observed in Germany in unit and revenue terms, while declines were seen in the UK and Spain," Olah said.

"Units grew double-digit in France and Italy while revenue fell in these markets, driven by a surge in cheap tower servers and increasing price competition at the lower end."

However, overall the market had improved. In 2012, EMEA server revenue shrank 9.6 per cent, he noted.

Giorgio Nebuloni, research manager for the EMEA enterprise server group at IDC, pointed out that there is an ongoing transition towards higher-end servers with the latest processors in the x86 category, which was 75.8 per cent of the total market by value.

"Capacity increases are also achieved through advances on the virtualisation and management software side, making scale-out less viable for on-premises datacentres in view of the high costs for energy, maintenance, and floor space rental.

"The trend is of course reversed in large B2C and B2B cloud facilities, which keep pushing the envelope on scale-out, commodity architectures," Nebuloni (pictured, right) said.

In EMEA, HP led the market, followed by IBM and then Dell. Fujitsu and Oracle came in fourth and fifth place respectively.