Facebook has more users in EMEA territories than the US-- and confirms the opening of a huge data centre in Luleå, Sweden. 

Speaking to the Financial Times, Facebook director of site operations Tom Furlong says "...most of our users are now outside the US.”

The Luleå facility will be first non-US based Facebook server farm (it has sites in California, Virginia and Oregon) and will consist of three 28000-square meter buildings housing all data processing from EMEA territories. 

Being 100km south of the Arctic Circle, the climate will take care of cooling Read more...

Gartner revises its WW enterprise IT spending forecast for 2012-- from predicting 5.9% Y-o-Y growth over 2011, the analyst says IT spending will reach $2.7 trillion with 3.9% Y-o-Y growth. 

Spending for 2011 should reach projections of $2.6TR. 

“The days when IT was the passive observer of the world are over. Global politics and the global economy are being shaped by IT,” Gartner says-- with 350 companies investing more than $1 billion each in IT.

The analyst says over 66% of CEOs believe IT will contribute more to their respective industries in the next 10 years than any previous decade, with the cloud, social, mobility and the information explosion fueling a new era of "post-modern business." Read more...

EMEA PC shipments total 26.6M units in Q3 2011 according to Gartner-- a -2.9% Y-o-Y decline, the 3rd consecutive decline for the market.

Consumer demand remains weak in, with lower sell-in to the channel.

Gartner says Q-o-Q growth provides a better picture of the market due to the current uncertain environment-- in which case the market shows 17.1% Q-o-Q growth, higher than seasonally expected and a sign of potential stability after 4 weak quarters.

Acer keeps on pulling the market average down-- “The impact on the market of Acer’s difficulties is c Read more...

Global data centre hardware (covering servers, storage and enterprise data center networking equipment) spending will grow by 12.7% Y-o-Y in 2011, reaching $98.9BN according to Gartner-- up from $87.8BN in 2010.

The analyst also forecasts spending will reach $106.4BN in 2012, before surpassing $126.2BN by 2015.

However W. European spending will remain weak in comparison to pre-downturn levels, even if WW spending will reach (and surpass) 2008 levels due to growth from BRIC countries and other emerging regions. 

Gartner says storage will be the main growth driver for the industry, with "almost half of the growth in spending" coming from the sector. 

The very largest size category of data centres (with over 500 racks of equipment) will increase in spending share-- from 20% in 2010 to 26% in 2015, as cloud adoption drives the shift from internal data centre provision to external.