The Covid-19 pandemic has had a bigger impact on demand for hardware than software or services, but some sectors like computing components continue to do well, according to channel analysis from Context.
Enterprise hardware revenues declined from -1% year-on-year in January to -11% in March and -17% in April, while services have increased to 4% in April and software revenues slipped from 10% to 4% over the period.
Of the major categories, those experiencing some of the biggest declines in revenue from Jan-April were servers (-10%), continuing a historic decline, and large format displays (-8%) strongly impacted by the suspension of projects during the crisis and disk arrays (-7%).
“While the Covid crisis has evidently impacted sales volumes in March and April, long-term drivers are of greater significance to data centre infrastructure with the move from on-premise to cloud affecting negatively the sales of mainstream servers and storage systems through distribution,” said Gurvan Meyer, Senior Research Analyst and Head of the Enterprise Team.