As I get back into the swing of things this New Year I thought it would be fun to look at some regional issues. In particular areas in which one region or another has a strong or weak association with particular offerings.
The Americas accounted for 42% of the $56.1B spent on servers in the year to the end of September – a much larger ratio than the 34% it represented of the total $6.6T ITC market. They also accounted for 41% of the 15.6M shipments in the year.
The Figure shows unit shipments of servers by quarter. Apart from an understandable decline during the Credit Crunch shipments have continued to grow – they are now double 2003 levels.
Vendor performance differs by region (see Figure). Dell now ships more servers in the Americas and worldwide, although HP reaches further internationally – leading in Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East and Africa.
IBM’s decision to offload its x86 business will disrupt the markets significantly – it’s not just Lenovo who will take advantage. In 2015 I expect Huawei, Sugon, Inspur and other Chinese vendors to make progress at the expense of Hitachi and Fujitsu in Asia Pacific, before expanding to become world players in 2016. I also expect to see increasing shipments from Chinese vendors in the under-exploited African market.
Europe remains an enigma. Bull is the only major European supplier and it’s too early to tell whether its new owner Atos will be able to stabilise – let alone grow – its business. There’s plenty of scope for others to establish themselves – if SAP ditched its hardware partners it could easily become a major server supplier for instance.
In fact the server market is even more skewed towards the Americas were we to count the use of the chips in self-built Hyper-scale data centres. There is also a regional bias in public Clouds of course. I expect this to remain a US-centric business in the long term, despite the expansion of the business to Europe and Asia in turn.