EMEA Revenue in Purpose-Built Backup Appliances Market Declined Y/Y 7% at $332.5 Million in 4Q20

Companies’ reduced spending desire due to extended lockdown and its financial impact have affected the EMEA purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA) market, which declined 6.7% in value Y/Y to $332.5 million in 4Q20, according to IDC Corp.‘s Worldwide Quarterly Purpose-Built Backup Appliance Tracker.

“Though the pandemic has created high demand for cloud data protection solutions, spending on on-premises HW applications such as PBBA has been deferred,” said Jimena Sisa, senior research analyst, EMEA storage systems. “PBBAs are evolving from a mere traditional backup product to secondary data platforms and data protection solutions for different and new architectures to support the change of the data protection market that is becoming more cloud based. IDC therefore expects that the PBBA market will remain active in years to come.”

EMEA PBBA Value by Product, 4Q20
(in $ million)

EMEA PBBA Open Systems, 4Q20
(in $ million)

Regional Highlights

Western Europe
The PBBA tracker for Western Europe declined in value 10.3% Y/Y, reaching $251.4 million in 4Q20.

The DACH market continued to be the largest and strongest in Western Europe in 4Q20, responsible for 37.3% of market value, 5.2 points more than the previous year’s share, and reporting an increase of 4.1% Y/Y.

The UK and Ireland lost 2.7 points in market share since last year, at 19.5% market value, and declined 21.3% in value Y/Y.

The French PBBA market reported a decline of 13.7% Y/Y in value and 12.1% market share.

PBBA demand in Western Europe in 4Q20 has been impacted by the continues financial effect caused by the pandemic and, hence, the reduced spending in these architectures. The major impact has been in target systems which declined 14% in market value, followed by integrated systems, which fell 8.5% Y/Y. Mainframes (VTL), on the contrary, managed to remain positive with 0.1% growth Y/Y. This segment benefited from major replacement IT projects.

CEMA
Despite reduced investment activity related to Covid-19, the PBBA market in CEMA showed momentum again, especially due to developments in the CEE region. Overall, market value grew 6.2% Y/Y to reach the highest value recorded historically of $81.2 million.

The acceleration of cloud and edge deployments in the region triggered demand for backup solutions optimized for hybrid cloud environments, which was in line with many vendors’ renewed portfolios. Another factor contributing to the positive performance in the CEE region, were improved macroeconomics and a slower decrease in end-user infrastructure spending at the end of 2020 compared to Western Europe, which brought 25.7% Y/Y growth for the CEE PBBA market.

The MEA regional backup market reduced its decline to 10.7% Y/Y (compared to -18.2% in the previous quarter) but was still not able to compensate the double-digit growth in 4Q19 as investments in countries that were impacted more negatively suffered.

“Vendors offering comprehensive backup and data management solutions for the very dynamic datacenter requirements shifting workloads from edge to core to cloud, were successful in the CEMA region due to the combination of a less mature and prone to growth market and less severe negative consequences caused by the pandemic,” said Marina Kostova, research manager, CEMA storage systems.

Taxonomy notes
IDC defines a PBBA as a standalone disk-based solution that uses software, disk arrays, server engines, or nodes that are used for backup data and specifically for data coming from a backup application (e.g., NetWorker, NetBackup, TSM, and Backup Exec) or that can be tightly integrated with the backup software to catalog, index, schedule, and perform data movement. PBBAs are deployed in standalone configurations or as gateways. PBBA solutions deployed in a gateway configuration connect to and store backup data on general-purpose storage. Here, the gateway device serves as the component that is purpose built solely for backup and not to support ny other workload or application. Regardless of packaging (as an appliance or gateway), PBBAs can have multiple interfaces or protocols. They can also provide and receive replication to or from remote sites and a secondary PBBA for DR.

Major companies covered in the tracker include Dell Inc., Veritas, HPE, IBM, Quantum, Barracuda, Oracle, Fujitsu, Exagrid, HDS, Unitrends, and FalconStor Software.