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.