Two surveys bring two sorts of good news for market watchers this week.

So we have IDC first off, which tells us that in EMEA (that semi-fictitious land of Europe, Middle East and Africa), the server market grew year-on-year by 9.1% in the fourth quarter – the highest annual increase recorded on the market since Q1 2007 (!). In dollar terms, that translates to $4.3bn.

Meanwhile, unit shipments grew by 3.4% on the same period, to nearly 650,000 units. For the full year 2010, EMEA server revenue increased year-on-year by 7.3% to $13.8bn, while unit server shipments in EMEA increased 10.6% to 2.3 million units.

We now immediately need to say that’s at the lower, volume systems end; demand for mid-range servers "remained depressed," in the market watchers’ eyes, with revenue plunging by 20.2%, year on year. But high-end server revenue recorded a rebound, with growth at 28.9% annually.

We’ve talked here before about discrepancies in market recovery – IDC seems to be of the same mind, finding that our regional server market continues to present a very mixed picture in terms of server spending recovery "with countries even in the most mature sub-region of Western Europe showing some very large discrepancies in terms of trends’.

Thus refreshes of mainframe installed base seems to be very different country to country but there’s also a lot of activity around data centre optimisation to support virtualisation, automation and cloud, it believes. (Mainframe recovery was by the way, extremely strong – up 62.6% year on year, to $600m.)

We said two reports. Our friends at Gartner have also released a separate picture of the server market, only this one’s at a global level.

And again, there’s a positive vibe; global server revenue climbed 16.4%, it believes, characterising 2010 as a year of pent-up x86-based server demand, especially in the blade and so-called ‘skinless’ (rack, data centre) markets. (It also saw an uptick for the mainframe, which it says helped to drive healthy increases in that segment.)

And most geographies did well, too – apart from Japan, which actually managed to fall 4.4%, we saw EMEA climb out the bed of recession by 10.4% server-wise, against regions like North America, with a very strong 24.5%.

In terms of players, IBM was top dog at 35.5%, which along with fellow Top 5 suppliers HP (30.4%) and Dell (13.1%) saw double-digit growth rates in terms of revenue. In contrast, Oracle and Fujitsu experienced revenue declines in the fourth quarter of 2010.

In server shipments, HP remained the worldwide leader for the fourth quarter of 2010, however, with a year-on-year shipment increase of 6.9%. Indeed, HP and IBM are tussling for outright market leadership, as both vendors achieved revenues of roughly the same, or over $15bn, for 2010.

Let’s go back to that headline global rise.

What’s behind it? In Gartner’s analysis, 2010 marked a return to growth fuelled primarily by a replacement of ageing x86 servers, which had been maintained through the "economic doldrums of 2009".

Some Cloud-related build-out is also likely to have fuelled increases, particularly in North America, while emerging regions, such as Asia/Pacific and Latin America, also added to the growth for the year, it also thinks.

And going forward? The outlook for 2011 suggests that growth will continue, but at lower levels, because the highest level of the replacement cycle for x86 servers was probably reached in 2010.

And for once – good signs for Europe, it has found. "The fourth quarter rounded off an encouraging year for the server market in EMEA with each quarter seeing positive year to year growth rates for both shipments and revenues," said Adrian O’Connell, research director at Gartner.

"EMEA was particularly badly hit by the downturn in 2009 and, although economic concerns continue across much of the region, the server market has shown good momentum during 2010," he added.

Putting these two together shows us that there finally is momentum again, that it’s IBM v HP and the rest – and that Yoorp may not be stuck right at the back of the pack when it comes to ICT recovery. At last – been a long time coming.