Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) server revenue in the first quarter of 2011 has reached $3.5bn, registering an increase of 10.8% compared to the same quarter previous year, while the number of servers shipped increased by 2.6% year-on-year to 580,000 units, according to market research and analyst firm IDC.
By technology, x86 servers reached $2.3bn in revenue and grew 11.9% year-on-year while non-x86 revenue registered strong growth of 8.6% year-on-year, with revenue reaching $1.1bn.
Mainframe (CISC-based servers) revenue increased 46.8% year-on-year but decreased 34.1% quarter-on-quarter. RISC servers declined 7.0% year-on-year, while EPIC servers grew by 2.5%, said IDC.
Volume servers (priced below $25,000) experienced moderate annual growth of 9.2%. The vast majority (99.4%) of volume servers shipped were x86 systems, whereas midrange servers displayed a balanced spread between the x86 and non-x86 segments (39.4% and 60.6% of units respectively).
IDC said that all form factors grew indicating that market demand is diversifying as organisations look into different environments based on hybrid architectures.
Blade revenue growth was above the market average, up 17.3% year-on-year, but it was nearly matched by rack-optimised systems (up 9.5% annually) and non-rack servers (up 9.2% on the back of mainframe demand).
HP maintained its top position for the 13th consecutive quarter in EMEA, supported by its ProLiant systems sales, up 12.4% year-on-year after selling $1.2bn in EMEA.
IBM’s EMEA revenue increased by 4.8 percentage points backed by sales of CISC servers, which grew by 68.3% in 1Q11, while Dell revenue share remained stable year-on-year, with sales of PowerEdge servers up 9.9% in 1Q11 on 1Q10.
IDC EMEA enterprise server group research director Nathaniel Martinez said the server market landscape is undergoing a transformation driven by increased demand for data centre optimisation to support virtualisation, automation and cloud strategies.
"Cloud projects are set to profoundly change European server environments, as more customer sites adopt cloud-based infrastructures in 2011," Martinez said.
