The latest Context figures show the enterprise server market slumped by 15 percent in the fourth quarter of 2021 and declined 4.4 percent across the year.
The IT market intelligence company said the decline was driven by “product supply issues and the reintroduction of stricter Covid-19 measures and resulting business uncertainty”, as well as long-term trends like “migration to hybrid cloud infrastructure and the increasing software-centric datacentre”.
Storage sales declined by 4.2 percent compared with Fourth Quarter 2020 – including a 13 percent drop for the HCI segment in Europe – but overall the category grew by 4.6 percent for the year.
Networking slipped 0.5 percent during the fourth quarter of 2021 but overall sales grew 5.9 percent across the whole year, including 5.2 percent in the UK.
The switching segment restricted growth overall for the networking market with revenue sales down 2.1 percent in Q4, the category’s lowest performance of the year.
Wireless did expand, with 5.7 percent growth in the Fourth Quarter and 13 percent overall growth for the year compared with 2020.
Context business analyst Gurvan Meyer said: “Supply difficulties will persist throughout 2022, while the long-term trend towards hybrid working and reduction in office space will lower investments in switching infrastructure. However, Q4 2021 revenue was actually fairly high and only moved into negative territory due to comparatives with Fourth Quarter 2020, when the business investment was strong following the end of the first wave of COVID.”
