Smaller vendors tighten grip on storage market
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The past year has seen much movement in disk storage systems, not least of all with niche players strenthening their position in the marketplace.
Smaller, more niche vendors are closing in on the bigger players in the disk storage systems market: the smaller vendors increased their share of the market by over 11% year-on-year, ending the first quarter of 2007 with almost 18% of the pie, according to figures recently released by analyst group Gartner.
Overall worldwide revenues were given a boost by strong sales in the Asia Pacific region, where revenues were up almost 30% over the year ago figures. Meanwhile, sales remained fairly static in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, growing by 3.5% year-on-year.
There was some movement, however, among the positions of the global leaders. EMC continued to hold the lion’s share of the market, banking almost a quarter of the sector’s revenues, while second-placed IBM did little to narrow the gap with a 13% share.
One company which did make impressive gains was California-based Network Appliance. It displayed a 20% revenue rise, enabling it to take fifth place away from Dell. Despite that slippage, Dell was able to show healthy growth of 11.5%. In contrast, Sun Microsystems dropped to seventh place, as storage systems revenues fell by a hefty 15%.
NetApp’s performance was even more impressive in the EMEA region. Its market share rose by almost a third to 9.7%, bringing it closer to IBM and HP, whose market shares were running at 14% and 20%, respectively. Although EMC was in a strong leadership position, it did see some erosion, after revenues declined by 8.2% compared to the same quarter in 2006.
