EMEA Purpose-Built Backup Appliance Market Declines 12% in 1Q17

EMEA purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA) vendor revenues declined 12% year over year to reach $191 million in the first quarter of 2017, according to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Purpose-Built Backup Appliance Tracker.

Capacity shipped for 1Q17 totaled 235PB, an increase of 5% from 1Q16. The growth mainly came from open systems products, with capacity increasing 11% year on year. Total EMEA PBBA open systems vendor revenue decreased 11% year on year during the first quarter, with revenues of $178 million. Mainframe system sales increased 23% year on year in 1Q17.

"As European organizations modernize their data protection infrastructures, they are solving the backup performance problem through investments in different storage technologies, such as purpose-built backup appliances," said Jimena Sisa, senior analyst, European storage research.

"Companies' main objective when approaching the infrastructure refresh cycle is to save costs. Those companies that have decided to renew their disaster recovery solutions using backup appliances as the primary driver have done so due to the benefits that PBBA provides them in terms of controlling expenditure, as they can extend organizations' existing investment and data protection hardware and software without having to change.

EMEA PBBA Vendor Revenue by Product, 1Q17 (Revenues in $M)

Open Systems

Vendor revenue in Western Europe was down 8% year on year in 1Q17 to $156 million, while capacity increased 9% year on year to 195PB. The PBBA market in Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa (CEMA) is slowing down the trend of recovery significantly and declined 24% year on year in 1Q17. This is very close to the 25% decline in 1Q16.

Small and medium companies prefer to use widely available cloud solutions which appear to be more cost effective than PBBA. Another reason for the decline in CEMA is that the market is becoming mature and serious growth is not expected.