Server shipments in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) totalled 550,000 units in the second quarter, a decrease of 5.9 per cent from the same period last year, said a report.

Server revenue totaled $3.1 billion in the quarter, a decline of 4.6 per cent from the same quarter last year, said the Gartner report.

“Demand for servers in EMEA remained constrained in the second quarter,” said Adrian O’Connell, research director at Gartner.

“All three EMEA sub-regions saw server revenue decrease in the second quarter of 2013. In Western Europe, revenue declined 1.6 per cent; in Eastern Europe it fell 17.9 per cent and the Middle East and Africa region decreased 9 per cent,” said Connell.

”In addition to weak demand, established vendors are increasingly challenged by relatively-new vendors such as Cisco, Asia/Pacific-based suppliers such as Lenovo and Huawei, and original design manufacturers selling directly to large end-users,” he added.

Worldwide server shipments grew 4 per cent year-on-year, while revenue declined 3.8 per cent  in the second quarter as compared to the same period last year, said the report.

“The global server market remains in a relatively weak state overall,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner in the report.

“X86 servers managed to produce an increase of 4.5 percent in units for Q2, and 2.1 per cent in revenue. RISC/Itanium Unix servers continued to decline at 27.4 per cent in units and 25.3 percent in vendor revenue compared to the same quarter last year. The ‘other’ CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, showed an increase of 6.9 per cent in revenue,” Hewitt said.

IBM had the lead in the worldwide server market based on revenue for Q2 - the company posted worldwide server revenue of nearly $3.2 billion for a total share of 25.6 per cent. The biggest revenue contribution was from its System z.  

In server shipments, HP remained the worldwide leader during the period in spite of a YOY shipment decline of 13.6 per cent for the quarter. Its worldwide server shipment share was 23.9 per cent representing a 4.8 per cent decrease in share from the same quarter in 2012.

In terms of server form factors, x86 blade servers declined by 3 per cent in shipments and 4.5 per cent in revenue for the quarter. The x86 rack-optimised form factor climbed 3.9 per cent in shipments and 2.4 per cent in revenue for the second quarter.

In terms of vendor performances, Dell and Fujitsu remained the only two vendors from the top five to show revenue growth. The EMEA market lacks the hyperscale segment growth that other regions benefit from. This means that vendors in the region are more exposed to the global weakness in enterprise sales. - TradeArabia News Service