A third of EMEA server shipments now virtualised

But IDC says customers have been disoriented by "holistic stack approaches" of vendors in the space

Server virtualisation is continuing to grow in EMEA but the "holistic stack approaches" of vendors in this space has overwhelmed customers, according to IDC.

Some 33 per cent of new servers shipped in EMEA in Q4 2014 were virtualised, the market watcher said, an increase from 30 per cent on an annual comparison.

While physical server shipments in Q4 were flat at 606,400 units, the number of server units that were virtualised at the point of initial shipment jumped 9.6 per cent to 200,300. Meanwhile, virtualisation licenses distributed in the three months to 31 December grew 12 per cent to 282,300, while EMEA virtualisation software revenue rose 14.2 per cent to $456.3m.

However, IDC research analyst Andreas Olah said a change in marketing tactics from virtualisation vendors had disoriented buyers.

"The leading virtualisation vendors are aggressively pushing holistic stack approaches that include various tools and links to their own cloud offerings, such as VMware with its software-defined datacenter model with vCloud Hybrid Service, and Microsoft's extensive Cloud OS framework," he said.

"Although clients were initially overwhelmed by the complexity of these approaches, their value proposition is becoming better understood, which drives wider adoption of these types of holistic solutions."

The topic of virtualisation continues to mature in the region, Olah added.

"This is evident from the fact that discussions in European organisations have moved on from initial approaches that focused mainly on hypervisor choice towards management and automation tools that let virtual machines move seamlessly between servers, and even between clouds in a hybrid model," he said.