Despite the slightly improved outlook for European economies, companies in the region are still not
spending on datacentres – with server shipments down for the
seventh quarter in a row.

Server shipments in
Europe, the Middle East and Africa during the second quarter of 2013 stood at 550,000, a fall of 5.9
percent from the same period last year, according to estimates from
analyst house Gartner.

European companies are
still reluctant to spend on server refreshes, Gartner research
director Adrian O’Connell said.

“The
European market is more driven by traditional demand from enterprises and in the enterprise space there is still a constrained set of
budgets for datacentre spend,” he said.

The
fall in server shipments across Europe contrasts with a four percent
rise in shipments worldwide, according to Gartner. The difference stems largely from Europe
having relatively few technology companies of the size of Google and
Facebook in the US or Tencent and Baidu in China to compensate for
weak server demand from enterprises, said O’Connell.

“Across Europe you
do not tend to have the same class of companies,” he said “there
is the service provider class in Europe but it is not quite the same
scale.”

Server
revenue for the EMEA totaled $3.1bn in the quarter, a decline
of 4.6 percent from the same quarter last year. All three EMEA
sub-regions saw server revenue decrease in the second quarter of
2013. In Western Europe, revenue declined 1.6 percent, in Eastern
Europe it fell 17.9 percent and in the Middle East and Africa it decreased 9 percent.

“This
was the seventh consecutive quarter for shipment decline and the
eighth consecutive quarter for revenue decline, showing an even more
sustained period of weakness than the one we saw during the economic
downturn that began in 2008,” said O’Connell.

When
analysed by server type the only section of the market where revenue increased was in the “Other” category, up 44.3 percent
year on year, which O’Connell said had been driven by mainframe
platform refreshes. x86 server revenue fell by 4.7 percent, while
RISC/Itanium Unix revenue dropped by 22.6 percent.