A tiny Violin plays as EMC tops all-flash array revenue chart

EMC with XtremIO is striding out in front of the pack in the all-flash array market, according to Gartner and Stifel Nicolaus numbers. Stifel Nicolaus' MD, Aaron Rakers, provided vendor all-flash array revenue share numbers to his clients, adding his Pure Storage ones to a Gartner report. The tabulated numbers cover the four …

[Dan Wilkie]

IBM's creditable showing was almost $40m, ahead of third-placed Pure Storage’s $150.2m.

That comma confused the hell out of me, I was trying to work out what weird reporting device a creditable showing was, and how $40m is ahead of $150.2m.

Damn you.

[Hurn]

If thy comma offend thee, pluck it out.

"IBM's creditable showing was almost $40m, ahead of third-placed Pure Storage’s $150.2m." makes perfect sense with the comma removed. Interesting, as the more common failure method consists of not using enough commas.

[XtremJosh]

Aaron got Pure's numbers wrong

Gartner's method of determining market share data includes product revenue only. The numbers included for Pure are product + service revenue. The actual numbers that should have been included are lower and only would have extended XtremIO's lead.

Furthermore, you must adjust for Pure's fiscal year. For example Pure's Q4 is November/December/January, which means that for market share purposes you'd actually have to estimate their numbers lower to replace January with September (and so on for each quarter).

From Pure's own earnings presentations, their product revenue was (for their fiscal quarters):

Q1'15 (calendar year 2014): $22.1M

Q2'15 (calendar year 2014): $31.1M

Q3'15 (calendar year 2014): $43.8M

Q4'15 (calendar year 2014): $57.8M

Q1'16 (calendar year 2015): $63.6M

Q2'16 (calendar year 2015): $71.2M

Q3'16 (calendar year 2015): $113.6M

Q4'16 (calendar year 2015): $127.3M

Chris - would love to see you adjust your charts accordingly.

[Chris Mellor 1]

Re: Aaron got Pure's numbers wrong

Thanks for this. I've sent your revised Pure numbers to Stifel's Aaron Rakers who provided the Pure revenue numbers you disagreed with. Let's see how he responds.

I've run your numbers through my personal spreadsheet and they do as you suggest, depressing Pure's line on the chart. It's still ahead of NetApp and HPE 3PAR but not by as much as before.

Chris.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Aaron got Pure's numbers wrong

Chris,

Would also be nice to see the same for the revised 3PAR numbers provided by Big_JM in the below comments.

[Anonymous Coward]

EMC's lead won't last through 2016

The sales push for XtremIO is over. 2016's push from EMC is now the All Flash VMAX3... problem here is they burned most of their VMAX2 -> VMAX 3 refresh cycles to put XtremIO on the map. What customers are going to run into this year is the fun of upgrading their XtremIO and encountering the dozens of possible bugs that can offline their entire array. Not to mention everyone who already has an XtremIO is locked into buying either their 10,20, or 40 TB expansions based on what they already own. I'm half expecting 80TB xbricks to be added or announced at EMC/Dell world 2016, but I won't hold my breath.

The VMAX3 is also nothing new (2 years old already and running on 4/5 year old Ivy bridge procs) and 6 Gb/s sas backend... adding SSDs and renaming the os to "Hypermax OS" is just lipstick on a pig. End of the day its still the most overpriced, overly annoyingly, and hard to deal with box in the storage market.

The new 450 and 850 models might be a bit different (up-to-date) inside, but no public disclosures on their guts yet. I'll grill the engineers in May...

[Cache Rich]

Re: EMC's lead won't last through 2016

I sincerely doubt EMC will let off the gas in 2016. XtremIO will continue to fill the gap for SMB customers who don't need big iron.

[Big_JM]

I think it's funny that the 3PAR numbers are wrong. I also find it humorous that "XtremJosh" chimed in to quote Pure's numbers were wrong. As if we didn't know who you were...

In my mind I read an article like this and I just think the author is pushing towards a 'pro-EMC agenda'. If I correct the 3PAR numbers you still see XtremIO on top:

2014 2015

Q1: 9M 59M

Q2: 12M 78M

Q3: 24M 71M

Q4: 58M 138M

A couple of quick notes. We entered this space late, admittedly. But even still the growth is explosive. In fact we're showing greater growth year-over-year than XtremIO @ over 130% for Q4 of FY '15.

And thankfully we have none of the ugliness that EMC brings to the table. Galvanizing a Sales Force to sell an unfinished and inferior product at the expense of customers as shown in their emails from the Pure litigation is just ugly. There's also no "impending doom" with Dell coming up nor is their a cannibal in my portfolio like VMAX AF.

We'll just keep making a better product and the numbers will eventually work in our favor. That mindset is what made 3PAR the #1 overall storage product in the market today. We'll just letting that do all the talking for us.

[Anonymous Coward]

We'll just have to see about that now won't we. The great thing about these reports is they are just straight revenue numbers. Customers vote with their wallets and it's very clear who is winning and who is not. And no amount of marketing bullshit, vendor chicanery, opinion, or faulty logic can change them.

[Anonymous Coward]

The competitive mud slinging in these forums always makes me giggle. Its just tech, not world ending concerns and everyone is working for these companies to make a buck to pay the bills, let's play nice :-)

[EMC is the Best <3]

Yah and these commenters are mostly storage salespeople so making a buck is pretty important to them.

Btw xtremio does indeed suck. 3par all flash and flashsytem are much better than emc or pure.

But anyways yes if this is what your life is about then you need some a frikken hobby.

[ByteMe]

Never underestimate EMC

There is one axiom in the storage industry: "Never underestimate EMC". Even they know they're not selling the best AFA product (see latest internal executive e-mails) but that doesn't stop them from dominating the AFA market. I've never been a fan of their storage products, but I always hold EMC in the highest regard from a sales execution standpoint. Well done.

[ottoroluk]

There's only one thing that I would highlight here...

I am not interested in the philosophical battles between the various parties that have commented on this article. The thing that seems clear to me is that the storage market is decisively shifting to solutions based on Flash technology and that this will be the trend for the years to come.