Market-Topping Revenue Growth Lets EMC Extend Storage Lead: IDC
EMC continues to outpace its rivals in the storage industry by grabbing an even larger share of a fast-growing part of the IT market while fending off a continuing assault by NetApp, according to a report from analyst firm IDC.
EMC's third-quarter disk storage systems revenue topped $1.6 billion, up 22 percent over last year's third quarter sales of $1.4 billion, making it by far the largest vendor in the market, IDC on Friday reported in its Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage System Tracker.
That growth actually made EMC the top vendor as measured two different ways by IDC.
IDC reports on the external disk storage system revenue, which includes sales of storage arrays with room for three or more disk drives. Third quarter revenue for this part of the market was estimated at $5.7 billion, up 10.8 percent over last year. EMC's share of this market reached 28.6 percent, up from last year's 25.9 percent share.
The analyst firm also reported on disk storage systems revenue, which includes storage system revenue plus storage included in servers. The storage market measured in that way reached $7.6 billion in revenue, up 8.5 percent over last year, IDC reported. EMC topped this part of the market with a 21.7 percent share, up from 19.3 percent last year.
For the external disk storage systems market, the number two spot in the list was considered by IDC to be a tie between IBM, with revenue of $735 million, and NetApp, with revenue of $700 million. However, NetApp's revenue rose 16.5 percent over last year compared to IBM's growth of 10.2 percent, which gives NetApp the potential to capture the number two spot in the near future.
Third place was held by Hewlett-Packard at $651 million, which was up 13.1 percent over last year.
It was followed by a tight race for number four by Hitachi and Dell. Hitachi's sales grew 22.1 percent to give it a total revenue of $505 million. Dell, however, slipped from number four last year to number five this year with a 2.6-percent drop in revenue to $459.
The Dell drop stems from the company's name to exit the sale of storage products from its largest former partner, EMC, and concentrate on sales of its own branded storage products from such acquisitions as EqualLogic and Compellent.
Dell last month reported that its EqualLogic and Compellent storage products drove Dell-branded storage revenue to grow 23 percent over last year. Dell-branded storage now accounts for 84 percent of all Dell's storage revenue. That helped offset the 15-percent drop in overall storage revenue stemming from Dell's decision to no longer sell storage products from EMC, its previous long-term partner.
For the worldwide total disk storage systems part of the market, leading vendor EMC was trailed by the top three server vendors, including HP with sales of $1.4 billion, IBM at $1.2 billion, and Dell at $879 million. All three saw total disk storage system revenue rise by single digits. NetApp rounded up the top five vendor list.
IDC separately reported that revenue for open SAN storage, which includes iSCSI, grew by 16.1 percent over last year. EMC was the leading vendor with a 25.3-percent share of the market, followed by IBM and HP.
However, in terms of the iSCSI market segment, Dell was the market leader, accounting for a market share of 30.3 percent, followed by EMC and HP, IDC reported.
Next: Acquisitions Help The Leading Vendors
EMC also led the NAS market for the third quarter with a 46.7-percent share, followed by NetApp with a 30.9-percent share. NAS revenue grew 3.5-percent year-over-year, IDC reported.
Acquisitions provided a good part of the growth of the top vendors.
In addition to Dell's acquisition of Compellent, which closed in the first quarter of 2011, IDC's report also took into account EMC's first quarter close of its Isilon acquisition, and HP's fourth quarter close of its 3PAR acquisition.