GEC NEWS WIREA new research report released by International Data Corporation (IDC) showed that the Middle East and Africa (MEA) enterprise hardware market (comprising servers and external storage) remained flat in 2015 when compared to the annual revenues seen in the previous year. Referencing its latest Quarterly Server and Disk Storage Systems Tracker, the research firm depicted that enterprise hardware revenue in MEA totaled $2.31 billion in 2015, describing the year as transitionary in nature with organizations gradually moving towards convergence and datacenter optimization.
Swapna Subramani, Research Manager for Enterprise Infrastructure at IDC Middle East, Africa, and Turkey. “The converged systems market, which includes hyper-converged appliances, grew by 6% year on year in 2015, and IDC expects this growth rate to reach 12% in 2016. New datacenter investments will leverage converged/hyper-converged infrastructures to support both public and private cloud deployments.”
The MEA external storage market declined 3% year on year in 2015. Year on year, the MEA x86 server market witnessed 2% growth in value but a 4% decline in volume in 2015. The UAE enterprise hardware market grew 3% in value year on year in 2015.
Saudi Arabia enterprise hardware market suffered a 12% decline in value year on year in 2015 and IDC forecasts a further 17% decline for 2016. IDC is expecting the Saudi enterprise hardware market to stabilize and exhibit a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5% through to 2020.
The Africa enterprise hardware market suffered a 5% year-on-year downturn in value in 2015.
