CEE server growth jumps

According to IDC's EMEA Quarterly Server Tracker, factory revenue in the EMEA server market grew 8.7% year over year to $4.4 billion in the second quarter of 2008. Shipments grew 12.4% to reach nearly 700,000, 95.5% of which were x86 boxes. The overall server market results in EMEA presented the highest growth since the first quarter of 2007 in factory revenue terms and since the third quarter of 2005 when looking at unit volumes, despite the overall slowing economy.

Growth in Central and Eastern Europe continued to outstrip other subregions. Server revenue there was up 17.8%, followed closely by the Middle East and Africa, with 16.1% more sales than in the same quarter last year. As usual, the more mature Western European markets lagged behind, but still displayed very healthy growth of 6.8%.

"The imbalance between unit and revenue growth indicates the x86 segment is showing the strain of commoditisation and downward pressures on prices," said Nathaniel Martinez, director of European Enterprise Servers at IDC. "The upswing in RISC/Itanium Unix servers and sales of CISC reflects a seasonal refresh cycle as corporate customers replace older legacy systems, and is expected to moderate. Technologies such as virtualisation, blade, and multicore continued to thrive."

According to Beatriz Valle, research analyst at IDC, "companies still see scalable servers with high availability and RAS features as a future-proof investment, while they wait for virtualization on x86 to mature further. These are uncertain times and IT managers are expecting their budgets to be squeezed even more in the coming quarters. But emerging models such as cloud computing, and growth in Web 2.0, are presenting exciting opportunities for vendors."