Never been a better time NOT to be selling servers

EMEA sales crash for eighth consecutive quarter, no vendor immune

Anyone banking on those Q3 server sales bonuses to pay for that Chrimbo trip to sunnier climes better wrap up warm after a cool wind blew through the EMEA market.

Shipments declined for the eighth consecutive quarter in the silly summer season, down 7 per cent on a year ago to 549,000 systems, preliminary data from Gartner shows.

The more important stats not yet included in those early estimates were factory revenues, but unless a miracle took place, it seems likely that they too went backwards.

"EMEA saw a weak quarter again," said Gartner.

All vendors' sales declined in the region - HP remained the clear market champ, shipping 221,000 units down 5.2 per cent year-on-year.

In its last sales push before going private again, Dell sold 104,000 servers, some 12.6 per cent fewer systems. IBM shipped nearly 44k boxes, down a whopping 37.9 per cent.

Fujitsu and Cisco sold 29.9k and 17.4k respectively. Then came the also-rans: Huawei managed to find a home for 2,400 servers and Lenovo shipped nearly 1.4k.

"The region remains vulnerable to economic weakness and conservative spending in the enterprise sector," Gartner stated.

Only five thousands unit sales across EMEA were non-x86, the stats revealed.

"The demand for hyper scale was small and not enough to drive weak enterprise spending into positive growth," said the analyst.

"The RISC/Itanuim Unix segment continues to suffer from migrations to alternative platforms as users seek lower-cost alternatives and more flexibility," the firm added.

A senior EMEA source at one vendor that asked to remain anonymous has crossed his fingers that the financial services and public sector reignite growth.

"We see signs that financial services companies are starting to look again at refreshes," he said.

And governments, particularly the UK, are talking up the economy. "We'll start to see them coming back into the market. We've certainly seen them active in a few departments".

There is nothing like a bit of vendor, er, optimism on Friday afternoon. ®