Analyst firm IDC has said the Middle East and Africa (MEA) enterprise hardware market, comprising servers and external storage, remained in a passive growth state according to the latest report from the research house.
Referencing its EMEA Quarterly Server and Disk Storage Systems Tracker, the research firm said the market expanded a sluggish 3.8% year on year in the Q3 2014 to total $522.9m, with much of the growth spurred by infrastructure deals within the oil and gas (O&G), telecommunications and government verticals.
“The MEA enterprise hardware market is poised to take a new direction in terms of infrastructure investment in 2015,” said Swapna Subramani, research manager for systems and infrastructure solutions at IDC Middle East, Africa, and Turkey. “We are expecting to see a shift in focus toward efficiency and consolidation, with demand moving from volume products to value products.”
According to the IDC report, the MEA region’s x86 server market witnessed a 3.0% year-on-year increase in value, but a 6.4% decline in unit terms during Q3 2014. “The dynamics of server adoption within enterprises has seen a major shift in the past six to eight quarters,” added Subramani. “Enterprises are now looking at consolidated and converged infrastructures with the focus shifting from boosting server capacity and volumes to optimising the server installed base and enabling cloud technologies. As such, the growth seen in the x86 server market’s value, and the corresponding decline in volume, can be attributed to the increased adoption of virtualisation technologies that utilise fewer server units than is the case in traditional data centres.”
IDC stated that the region’s external storage market witnessed robust growth of 13.9% year on year in the third quarter of 2014.
”Data centre investments are shifting from being server centric to being more data and storage-centric, with the region’s external storage market expected to grow at a faster rate than the server market over the coming five years,” said Subramani. “The storage market is witnessing increased uptake of entry-level and midrange storage devices driven by demand for the NAS protocol. High-end storage devices actually saw a sharp decline in shipments in Q3 2014, validating the overall market movement into more cost-optimised, scalable solutions that can be adapted to 3rd Platform technologies such as cloud, big data, mobility and social.”
The UAE’s enterprise hardware market witnessed strong growth of 32.7% in Q3 2014, with telco and government spending accounting for the majority of the growth. Saudi Arabia’s growth was more subdued at 5.1% year on year, with a decline in the server market offset by strong growth in the external storage market.
The enterprise hardware market in the other Gulf Cooperation Council (OGCC) countries witnessed a 1.8% decline in Q3 2014 compared to the same quarter last year. This decline was solely due to a decline in server shipments in the region as the external storage market registered solid double-digit growth.
