Server revenues in Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) grew a modest 1.3% to total $9.98 billion in 2013, according to IDC.
The modest growth in 2013 was in sharp contrast to the heady 17% growth recorded in 2010 and 2011, which was fuelled by massive infrastructure buildout by Web 2.0 and cloud service providers in China.
The server market in APEJ nevertheless continued to outperform other regional markets on a worldwide basis, IDC said.
“Strong adoption of server virtualization and cloud technologies in the enterprise segment, rapidly increasing the appeal of public cloud providers for specific workloads and growing interest in integrated systems, were some of the key technology disruptions that impacted the server spending growth in 2013,” says Rajnish Arora, associate vice president of IDC's Asia-Pacific Enterprise Computing Research.
“Global economic malaise, lack of aggressive economic reforms in emerging economies, and political turmoil coupled with upcoming federal elections in certain countries were some of the non-technology factors that stymied server spending growth in 2013," added Arora.
China, which has increasingly become the bellwether and cornerstone of the APEJ server market since 2008, grew at a much more anemic pace in 2013. The Web 2.0 and public cloud services providers such as Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba building hyper-scale datacenters, who were responsible for driving the heady demand for servers in the China for the past several years, took a breather in 2013 that impacted the spending growth.