EMC: King of storage needs to shore up defences

IDC’s latest storage tracker says the enterprise storage market was flat in the 12 months since 2015’s second quarter, but HPE now ties with EMC for first place, with IBM and NetApp in equal fourth place after Dell. EMC (18.1 per cent) lost -5.5 per cent points of revenue share in the year, HPE (17.6 per cent) gained 8.8 per …

[Jim O'Reilly]

Look at box count, not revenue

The ODMs only had 9% market share, but this translates into perhaps 20 to 25% of units shipped, since ODM boxes are really inexpensive compared with EMC and HPE. Another factor here is that the customers of the ODMs typically buy drives direct from their makers, while the others include expensive drives in their revenue numbers.

In other words, ODMs are eating up the market faster than we think. IDC needs to get up to date on how it reports all of this.

[unredeemed]

Tracking ODM"s seems like an impossible task to me. Many are not US based companies, not publicly traded, and you would resort to what, statistical sampling? Interviewing a mailing list?

[Anonymous Coward]

Im surprised Nimble arent showing a percentage point or two now and figuring on the league as a stated competitor rather than being lumped with 'others'. They seem to be doing a decent job, taking market share and their customers really like the product. At what threshold does an independent such as Pure, Nimble etc warrant individual mention?

[WageSlave]

IDC storage numbers are getting completely skewed & needs a re-think

The trouble with IDC's visible storage revenue reporting is that it misses several things:

* Software-Defined Storage

* HyperConverged

* Usable storage space vs. revenue

* Quality of storage type (eg expensive Tier1 fault-tolerant vs. cheap 'n deep archive), etc., etc..

Essentially SDS and HyperConverged are eating chunks out of the SAN market; most of which is invisible to IDC, and which often ends up on the same vendor lists (Dell, HP, etc.) as server revenue.

So this whole market segmentation thing is getting blown by the new way of doing things.