EMEA Purpose-Built Backup Appliance Market Declined in 4Q17

　　EMEA purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA) vendor revenues declined 9.5% year over year to reach $233.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2017, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Purpose-Built Backup Appliance Tracker.

　　Total EMEA PBBA open systems vendor revenue decreased 7.3% year on year, with revenues of $216.7 million. Mainframe system sales decreased 30.2% year on year in 4Q17.

　　"PBBA is still a key component of the backup and DR solutions for the EMEA organizations, but the advent of other new backup and DR solutions such as hyperconverge, cloud gateways, and cloud-native applications are impacting negatively on demand for PBBA solutions in this region," said Jimena Sisa, senior research analyst, EMEA Storage Systems, IDC.

　　EMEA PBBA Vendor Revenue by Product, 4Q17 (Revenues in $M)

Open Systems

　　Regional Highlights

　　Western Europe

　　Vendor revenue in Western Europe decreased 7.2% year on year in 4Q17 to $181.9 million. Nevertheless, an increase that came from target systems has been reported with a 17.8% rise year on year.

　　Some countries show stable macros with some modernization deals. There was robust PBBA spending in Iberia and Benelux, with year-on-year growth of 38.2% and 24.6%, respectively. In the United Kingdom, uncertainty is still high, with lower business confidence due to Brexit and political turmoil.

　　"Legacy hardware solutions have been facing difficult market conditions due to the modernization of datacenters. However, the implementations of hybrid storage infrastructures and the advent of the GDPR deadline is driving organizations' IT investment in on-premise solutions due to the benefits they offer — a cost effective way to extend an organization's existing investment and data protection hardware and software without having to change existing processes — which has helped to boost the PBBA market in certain countries in Western Europe," said Sisa.

　　CEMA

　　The Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa (CEMA) PBBA market failed to keep the momentum from the previous quarter and declined 16.6% for $51.7 million in 4Q17. A change of backup strategy of some of the leading vendors and higher penetration of smaller companies affected market ranking and overall market performance.

　　The total market in both CEMA subregions recorded a double-digit decline, though displaying different segment preferences. Central & Eastern Europe (CEE) target PBBA systems kept the positive trend, while integrated systems contracted significantly. Conversely, investments in integrated systems in the Middle East & Africa (MEA) continued to grow, tripling their share year on year.

　　"While growth is temporarily stalled, the potential for hardware backup solutions in CEMA is not exhausted," said Marina Kostova, research manager, IDC CEMA. "As in WE, GDPR compliance will support investments in CEE and the slower public cloud development in the overall region will concentrate investments on on-premise primary and secondary storage solutions, including PBBA."