Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) server revenue in the third quarter of 2010 has reached $3.1bn, an increase of 6.4% compared to the same quarter previous year, while the number of servers shipped increased by 10.2% year-on-year and 550,000 were sold, according to market research and analyst firm IDC.
By technology, x86 industry standard servers consolidated their position as the dominant technology, with $2.2bn in revenue and 533,000 shipment units, an annual growth of 26.5% and 11.0%, respectively.
The research firm said the higher ASVs are a sign that enterprises are moving their mission-critical applications to x86 from RISC, CISC, and EPIC, and demanding more richly configured systems with higher availability features.
However, spending on non-x86 servers continued to slide in 3Q10, with sales of $939.3m, down 22.5% annually.
IDC EMEA enterprise server group senior research analyst Giorgio Nebuloni said blade servers performed stronger than the overall server market, accounting for $63m in revenue in the wake of strong double-digit growth in the EPIC and RISC offerings from HP and IBM particularly.
"Despite huge demand in emerging countries such as Russia and Israel, x86 blades produced 19% yearly revenue growth, which did not match the 40% year-on-year revenue growth in rack-mount machines in the quarter," Nebuloni said.
Geographically, Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (CEMA) recorded year-on-year growth of 14.6% in value and 17.9% in volume in 3Q10 from shipments of 147,000 units worth $743.50m, while Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) recorded the highest growth due to market recovery across most countries in the region.
Revenue in CEE reached $383m, representing 27.8% year-on-year growth while the growth rate for the Middle East and Africa (MEA) was only 3.3% year on year, with the market value rising to $360.5m.
The report said that the strong growth in CEE was driven by the three largest countries Russia, Poland, and the Czech Republic, each of which reported double-digit value growth; combined, they made up over 70% of total server market value in CEE.
HP maintained its top position for the 11th consecutive quarter after growing its market share to 43.7% and $1.4bn in revenue while IBM and Oracle market share decreased to 28% and 6.1%, respectively.
