Increased use of data protection as a service and economic constraints caused by the pandemic have affected the EMEA purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA) market, which declined 4,5% in value year on year to $310,9-million in the third quarter of 2020, according to International Data Corporation’s (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Purpose-Built Backup Appliance Tracker.
“Due to social distancing and working from home, there has been an acceleration of data protection as a service (DPaaS), which includes disaster recovery as a service, backup as a service, and archive as a service, to reduce in-house infrastructure and labor,” says Jimena Sisa, senior research analyst: EMEA Storage Systems at IDC.
“When enterprises were considering IT offers aimed at reducing total cost of ownership, they were more eager to shift to an operational model when purchasing their backup and disaster recovery solutions to reduce uncertainty and get a framework that would help address their future demand needs.”
The PBBA tracker for Western Europe declined in value 5,7% year-on-year, reaching $248,1-million in 3Q20.
PBBA demand in Western Europe in Q320 has been somewhat reduced by a move to cloud data protection, with the greatest impact on mainframes (VTL), which declined 61,4% in market value, followed by target systems (-2,9% YoY) and then integrated systems (-1,2% YoY).
“The relationship of technology to the success of businesses is considered critical not only during the pandemic, but also in the digital economy post-pandemic. Hence, PBBA vendors that support different consumption models, exploit cloud economics, and provide protection for different and new architectures would be the most successful and considered by enterprises,” says Sisa.
As expected, the growth in value of the PBBA market in CEMA slowed and remained flat YoY during Q320, recording $62,8-million.
The shares of the two subregions were almost equal as CEE recorded impressive growth of 34% YoY fueled by most of the countries in the region. Part of this performance was due to the decline in the quarter a year ago. Despite the growing demand for data protection in the context of remote work and education, MEA saw a reduction in PBBA spending of 18% YoY coming from the largest countries in the region.
“End users’ investment plans in the second half of 2020 were more focused on shifting to public cloud and HCI, restraining the investments in DC infrastructure,” says Marina Kostova, research manager: CEMA storage systems. “Data protection was undoubtedly a priority in the pandemic environment, but public cloud solutions partially cannibalized the traditional backup appliances market.”