MEA revenues for purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA) vendor declined 9% year over year to reach $195-million in the third quarter of 2016, according to International Data Corporation’s (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Purpose-Built Backup Appliance Tracker.
Capacity shipped for 3Q16 totalled 237Pb, an increase of 23% from 3Q15.
Total EMEA PBBA open systems vendor revenue decreased 8% year over year during the quarter, with revenues of $181-million. Mainframe system sales declined 14% year over year in 3Q16.
Although most of the economies in Western Europe declined in 3Q16, emerging markets, mainly in Central Eastern Europe, saw healthy growth in the PBBA market, increasing 29% year on year in vendor revenue.
Vendor revenue in Western Europe was down 10% year on year in 3Q16 to $140-million, while capacity increased 35% year on year to 179Pb.
“The economic and political turmoil has impacted consumer confidence, delaying modernization investment projects and negatively affecting the PBBA market in Western Europe,” says Jimena Sisa, senior analyst: European storage research at IDC. “Storage manufacturers have increased the prices of their products due to the devaluation of the pound and this has reduced demand for storage products in the UK, and has triggered a move toward cloud services.”
PBBA market revenue figures in Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (CEMA) show clear signs that the declining trend that began in 2015 is starting to slow. The region contracted 4% year over year, to $55,2-million, in 3Q16.
“This should be seen as a recovery in comparison to the 12,9% decline in 3Q15. Expectations for the eventual negative impact of Brexit in CEMA were not confirmed by the market,” says Kostadin Kostadinov, research analyst at IDC CEMA.
“Diverging trends were observed in CEE and MEA, with Central and Eastern Europe seeing double-digit year-on-year growth due to backup investments by the banking and government sectors and the slow transition to public cloud services. Conversely, the Middle East and Africa market declined significantly due to the political instability and the worsening business climate in which only the most critical primary storage projects were financed,” says Marina Kostova, senior research analyst at IDC CEMA.
