IDC's latest server sales estimates for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) for the first quarter of 2009 contain mixed messages for the Power i market.

On one hand, the analyst reports that IBM Power Systems' sales jumped from $96M in the first quarter of 2008 to a whopping $312M in terms of factory revenue in EMEA in the first quarter of this year. On the other, it reports that sales of servers running IBM i OS, whether they be System i or Power Systems, came to $52M in EMEA in Q109, down by 44% from the same period a year ago.

So why the apparent disparity? For a start, it is worth pointing out that these are the first specific figures that IDC has produced on i-driven IBM servers since the System i was subsumed by the Power Systems brand on April 2 last year. There is also the issue of quite where these comparative year-on-year figures came from given that the Power Systems range was not actually announced until the second quarter of 2008.

On digging deeper, it turns out that the steep increase in Power System sales refers to all IBM servers running Power6 processors. IBM rolled out its first such machine, a modified System p 570, in May 2007. It started selling Power6 boxes in earnest towards the back end of that year, so the huge growth in overall Power6-driven sales makes some sense.

In fact, IDC says that factory revenue for the combined sales of the Power Systems plus System p and System i servers in EMEA came to $347m in the first quarter of 2009, down 23% from a year ago. Such a dip in sales is in line with the general IT hardware market right now which is, of course, dire.

IDC says that the EMEA server market experienced its fastest year-on-year decline since it started reporting on it in 1996. Revenue was down 34.3% to $2.9 billion, and shipments were also down, by 29.6%, to below the half-million mark.

To put IDC's figures on i OS into some kind of perspective, the analyst says that sales of z/OS-driven mainframes were down 37.9% annually, while Windows, Unix, and Linux-driven machines recorded declines of 33.9%, 33.0% and 32.7% respectively. HP was the top vendor, with 36.9% of EMEA revenue. IBM took second place, with 28.9% and Sun was third with 12%.

Nathaniel Martinez, IDC programme director for European systems and infrastructure solutions, says: "IDC believes that server spending cuts are a short-term response to degrading economic conditions, but in the long-term, organisations will reinitiate IT infrastructure investment to lower overall cost structure and operate at a higher level of efficiency through virtualisation, automation, and power-saving technologies."