Virtualisation boosts EMEA server market

The EMEA server market showed a 4.8% growth in the first quarter of the year thanks to the continued drive to virtualisation.

According to IDC's latest report on servers, the Middle East and Africa was the fastest growing market in the EMEA region, with server revenues up by an impressive 16.4%

Nathaniel Martinez, director of European enterprise servers at IDC commented: "The strong results indicate that virtualisation is acting as a driving force in the market, as end users discover its possibilities in management and automation. The technology is being used to tackle server sprawl and has particular relevance in the fields of high availability and disaster recovery for SMBs, a segment that server vendors are fiercely aiming at."

The IDC's figures showed that Windows had claimed a lion's share of the EMEA market while Linux's growth in the same market had slowed slightly. Sales of blades are now showing an annual growth of 53.1% in revenue, while non-rack servers retained their market share of 47.6% thanks to the consistency of their popularity in the SMB segment.

HP and IBM continued to go head-to-head in the server market with the former just edging out the latter in the first quarter. The IDC report showed that vendors, Sun and Dell also enjoyed sustained growth in the market with saw its revenue increase by more than 300% to nearly $200 million for Sun while Dell showed 21% growth. Fujitsu Siemens had a great start to 2008 with growth of 34%.

"The server market is now immersed in a period of disruption and is displaying remarkable resilience in both the value and volume areas. Processor technologies and form factors such as multi-core and blade are pushing virtualization to the forefront, and vendors are playing catch-up to sell solutions to the mid-market that exploit these technologies. Green computing will also be a segment to watch," said Beatriz Valle, research analyst at IDC.

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