EMC tops storage rankings, again

03-06-2005

by Deirdre McArdle

The global external disk storage market continued its growth patterns of the past eight quarters with revenues increasing by 6.7 percent year-on-year.

That's according to figures from research firm IDC, which said revenues in the external disk storage systems market grew to USD3.8 billion in the first quarter of 2005. The total disk storage systems market grew at a slightly lower year-over-year rate of 6 percent in the first quarter.

EMC was the star performer of the external disk storage market, clocking up its seventh consecutive quarter as number one. The storage firm recorded market share of 21.4 percent with revenue of USD808 million, representing revenue growth of 12.2 percent on the same period in 2004.

HP and IBM followed EMC with 17.7 percent and 11.5 percent revenue share respectively while Hitachi edged out Dell for the fourth position with 9.1 percent revenue share. Dell ended the quarter with a 7.7 percent share of the market.

"An analysis of top storage systems vendors' performance over the past several quarters suggests that partnerships are becoming an important component of their market strategies," said Natalya Yezhkova, senior research analyst in IDC's Storage Systems. "This mutually beneficial approach allows each partner to offer more complete solutions for its customers and often opens a door to new market segments and leads to growth in revenue and market shares."

The total network storage market, which is network attached storage (NAS) combined with Open/iSCSI storage area network (SAN), reported year-on-year growth of 16.7 percent to more than USD2.3 billion. In this market too EMC continues to maintain its leadership with 29 percent revenue share, followed by HP with 20.4 percent. Dell and Network Appliance both posted impressive year-over-year revenue growth for the quarter, with 47.1 percent and 29.7 percent growth respectively.

EMC's dominance spread to all the major segments of the external disk storage systems market including External RAID, Networked Storage, Open/iSCSI SAN and NAS.

The firm, which employs 1,200 people in Cork and Dublin, continues to record revenue growth. During the first quarter of 2005 the firm reported its seventh quarter of double-digital revenue growth; it had revenues of USD2.24 billion in the quarter, a 20 percent increase on the USD1.87 billion reported for the year-ago quarter.