The data center market is booming in Q1 2016, having gown by 7% in the last year and despite Brexit it looks likely to contiue. It’s such an exciting subject that we’ve designed a continuous information service for industry business planners to gain essential insights and data from. For those of you who can’t wait, here are some highlights of the 60 pages of research we just published.
Market Overview
- The data center market in the EU is worth €67b
- Cisco retains it overall leadership, based largely its dominance of the enterprise network market.
- Combining EMC with Dell will increase their combined market share in the data center market and propel the new company above IBM in second place.
- Q1 2016 saw more modest growth (7%) than the previous 4 quarters.
- In terms of growth and size the UK is ahead of both Germany and France.
- The strong replacement market for enterprise networks ended in 2015 – the Q1 gorwth was less as a result.
Vendor Activity
- Acquisitions in the quarter include Cisco’s of CliQr and Jasper Technologies, IBM’s of IRIS Analytics, the Weather Company’s product and technology business, Ustream, Aperto, ecx.io, Truven Health Analytics, Resilient Systems and Resource/Ammirati.
- The acquisition of EMC by Dell is on target having been approved be government legislators in the US and Europe.
- Major product announcements included Dell’s Operating System 10 for Open Networking, HPE’s Machine Learning as a Service for processing IoT data at the edge of the network, new threat detection activities from IBM (with Check Point Software) and Dell for its SOnicWALL firewalls.
- Huawei introduced the world’s first 32-socket x86 server.
- There were numerous partnerships and sales to European telcos such as Huawei’s with Vodafone, Tellasonera, TDC Group and Deutsche Telekom; as well as Telefonica with IBM, Oracle and Huawei.
- Many announcements concern the development of ‘digital transformation’ projects with enterprise customers.
Technology Trends
- Infrastructure software is now one quarter of EU data center spending.
- Servers and storage are moving towards a ‘software defined’ world, while networking is still very dependent on dedicated hardware.
- Industry standard x86 servers are by far the most dominant processor types.
- x86 virtualisation has been based on hypervisors up until now – container-based computing will change things.
- LAN switches accounted for a third of enterprise network spending in the last year.
- Hardware shipments, revenues and capacities are all in decline in the storage market making further consolidation unavoidable.
Following the market – especially in the 27 countries of the EU and the UK – trying to handle the massive fluctuations n exchange rates can be a nightmare for our industry. ITCandor is a research partner who knows what’s what. Want to learn more and subscribe? Please fill in the form below to download a flyer for the service.
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