Asia's market for appliance servers has slowed, months after it picked up steam to generate sales worth US$72.1 million this year.
Avneesh Saxena, associate director for enterprise systems research at International Data Corp (IDC), blamed the slump on the regional economic downturn.
Appliance servers are network-enabled computing devices designed to provide a single dedicated service, such as Web caching, e-mail, file and print, Internet access, or a predefined suite of services.
IDC said appliance server market revenues in the Asia-Pacific, excluding Japan, reached US$221.9 million last year.
That demand gained momentum in the first three months of this year, when sales went up almost 32 per cent to US$72.1 million from the same period a year ago.
Appliance servers had gained acceptance because of their ease of deployment, optimised performance and relatively low cost of ownership, Mr Saxena said.
'Internet proliferation and telecommunications expansion are the main drivers of appliance server demand, and we expect small and medium-sized enterprises to play a major role in driving their uptake in the near future,' he said, adding such an uptake would have to wait until the economic situation in the region improved to spur sales.
