When viewing the EMEA market by product, the biggest decline was seen in large system revenues, which declined 23.6% YoY to $245.0 million. The best performing servers were custom multinode, which saw 118.3% YoY revenue growth, along with custom rack optimized at 66.8% revenue growth.
"IDC predicts that reinvestment by tier 1 service providers will begin to push the larger Western European server market," said Eckhardt Fischer, senior research analyst, European Infrastructure, IDC.
Regional Highlights
HPE remained at the top of the Western European server market with 32.1% share, but post-merger Dell EMC closed the gap with an increase to 19.2% of revenues in the market. "HPE's year-over-year decline masks a strong performance over last quarter, when revenues grew by 11.1%. ODMs remained a standout performer at 76.8% growth, nearly doubling their market share to 15.2% in Western Europe," said Michael Ceroici, research analyst, European Infrastructure, IDC.
At a country level, the U.K. and Ireland performed strongly with 12.0% and 68.9% revenue growth respectively. As the largest server market in the region, Germany contributed to a positive European quarter with a 10.7% increase to $100.4 million. France underperformed its neighbors with a 16.0% decline in revenue, largely due to weakness in high-performance computing (HPC) deals from vendors such as Groupe Bull and Cray.
"Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa [CEMA] server revenue recorded its first year-over-year growth in the last two years, increasing by 4.1% to $640.9 million in 2Q17. x86 servers drove the growth, benefiting from product refresh related to Intel's new Skylake processors," said Jiri Helebrand, research manager, IDC CEMA. "The Central and Eastern Europe [CEE] subregion grew by 13.5% year over year with revenue of $309.4 million supported by demand from the public space as well as large purchases of ODM servers in Russia."
Helebrand said Hungary, Kazakhstan, and Russia were among the strongest performing countries with Hungary benefiting from demand from the government sector. The Middle East and Africa (MEA) subregion continued on its downward path, declining by 3.3% year over year to $331.5 million as economic activity in the region remains subdued. However, stabilization of commodity prices is helping to drive demand in the African region, which recorded the largest growth in EMEA in 2Q17, with South Africa posting double-digit growth.
