For the full year 2015, the PBBA EMEA market fell 5% to just over $935 million from $985 in 2014. "The decline in the EMEA PBBA market in 2015 was overall affected by the negative euro/dollar current exchange rate, " said Jimena Sisa, senior research analyst, European Storage, IDC. "The faster move to the 3rd platform is forcing organizations to carefully plan their investment and deployment of backup solutions that would help them reduce costs, improve response times, and make the business more agile. On-premise, data increasingly sits on compressed and deduplicated flash storage devices, and backup software supports deduplication, while additionally organizations see cloud-based backup solutions as the alternative to disk appliances, impacting, as a consequence, the PBBA EMEA market."
Regional Highlights
The performance of the Western European market this quarter, at 2% growth in vendor revenue, was mainly due to growth at some of the major players, said Sisa. Total EMEA PBBA capacity shipped for 4Q15 reached 273 petabytes, a decrease of 7.9% year over year, while annual capacity was up 7.9% to 863 petabytes, with Western Europe accounting for 72% of the total PBBAs shipped in 2015.
"Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa [CEMA] PBBA revenue decreased heavily by 42% year over year to $60.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2015," said Marina Kostova, senior research analyst, Storage Systems, IDC CEMA. "This was the worst quarter for the PBBA market in 2015, which otherwise recorded a more moderate decline of 14% for the full year. A clear shift to lower price band solutions, evident throughout the year, coupled by persisting political and economic issues in the region and in Russia, particularly, brought about this development."
Total EMEA PBBA 4Q15 Results
Total PBBA mainframe system factory revenue declined 26% year over year in 4Q15, with revenues reaching $23.3 million. The open system market also declined 11% in the same period.
