"Even after taking exchange rates into consideration, EMEA’s storage market appears to be bucking an overall economic slowdown," said Eric Sheppard, IDC European disk storage systems program manager. "This can be partly attributed to increased spending on networked storage by midsize companies, as well as spending on DR and storage consolidation projects within larger enterprises. This growth is also driven by a protracted move of disk systems into new uses, such as backup and archive."

Western Europe Supplier Shares

The Western European portion of EMEA’s external disk storage systems market increased 6% over the previous year to €888 million. EMC was the largest supplier in Western Europe, with €165 million. This was up 3% over the company’s €159 million during 2Q07. HP, IBM, NetApp, and Dell were all among the top 5 suppliers, with respective revenues of €146 million, €120 million, €83 million, and €75 million. Sun Microsystems partly benefited from an increasingly closer relationship with Hitachi. In total, Sun’s €73 million in revenue represented a 25% increase over the previous year. Hitachi’s branded revenue (i.e., excluding sales through Sun) was up 9% over the previous year to €36 million. Hitachi’s branded and non-branded sales (i.e., including sales through Sun) were up 18% year over year when measured in euros. Fujitsu Siemens Computers’ branded storage sales were down 18% over the previous year to €26 million. The company’s branded and non-branded disk systems sales (i.e., including sales of EMC and NetApp branded arrays) were up 17% when measured in euros.

Central/Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa (CEMA)

The CEMA external disk storage market increased 11% year on year in dollar revenue terms, but showed a -4.3% year-on-year decline in euro-based terms in 2Q08, to reach €244.84 million. The result was a strong 47.3% capacity increase year on year as overall ASP/GB declined significantly by -24.6% in the same period, making storage capacity a lot cheaper for end users. EMC remained the largest supplier in CEMA, generating €83.48 million, a 1.4% increase over the corresponding quarter of the previous year. HP, IBM, NetApp, and Sun Microsystems were all among the top 5 suppliers, with revenues of €45.14 million, €44.94 million, €20.98 million, and €15.58 million respectively. NetApp was the fastest-growing supplier in the CEMA region, with a year-on-year growth rate of 47.5%, thanks in part to strong sales in the Africa region. Large and very large businesses continued to be major customers for storage systems, but SMEs increased their storage expenditure, making the midrange and volume storage segments the fastest expanding (2.1% year on year).

"Both large businesses and SMEs continue to invest in storage products, regarding the efficient management of business data required to maintain efficiency, remain competitive, and meet increasingly rigorous legal requirements," said Philip Korinek, IDC CEMA disk storage systems program manager.

The data in this press release was taken from IDC’s EMEA Disk Storage Systems Quarterly Tracker, which provides thousands of unique disk storage systems data points in 35 EMEA countries.