The year that started with optimism for the external disk market is slowly starting to show a gloomy picture for months to come. The disappointment is evident because there were signs that solution providers would be able to capitalize on the Q4’13 budget flushes coupled with improved economic sentiment. However, data indicates that the external storage systems second-quarter factory revenues worldwide were down 1.4 percent on the same period a year ago to $5.87bn.From the long term perspective, fundamental issues related to storage infrastructure inefficiencies will continue to drive the sales pipeline provided the trend is backed by targeted budgets by enterprises; then perhaps by the year end we may see signs of improvement in the bottom line growth.
Research from IDC indicates two noteworthy developments. Firstly, strong storage sales in the Asia-Pacific region and emerging markets. Other positive signals within the global storage market indicate upward movement from entry-level storage and improved sales in EMEA and Latin America. Secondly, high-end storage sales fell for the fourth consecutive quarter in Q2 2014.”The high-end decline was not as striking as last quarter but it was coupled with a drop in midrange sales, suggesting weak demand is spreading to other parts of the market” said research lead of IDC.
Below is a look at the revenue growth from industry leaders:
|
Vendor
|
2Q14 revenue
|
2Q14 market
share |
2Q13 revenue
|
2Q13 market
share |
2Q14/2Q13
revenue growth |
|
EMC
|
$1,764m
|
22.7%
|
$1,860m
|
24.0%
|
-5.2%
|
|
HP
|
$1,361m
|
17.5%
|
$1,300m
|
16.8%
|
4.7%
|
|
IBM
|
$1,000m
|
12.9%
|
$1,046m
|
13.5%
|
-4.3%
|
|
Dell
|
$887m
|
11.4%
|
$943m
|
12.2%
|
-5.9%
|
|
NetApp
|
$765m
|
9.8%
|
$789m
|
10.2%
|
-3.0%
|
|
Others
|
$2,004m
|
25.8%
|
$1,819m
|
23.5%
|
10.2%
|
|
All
|
$7,782m
|
100%
|
$7,757m
|
100%
|
0.3%
|
Source: IDC
EMC, IBM, and Symantec were the top ranking storage software suppliers with market shares of 25.9%, 16.0%, and 13.3%, respectively. Data Protection & Recovery software sales were up 10.2% year over year to $1.45 billion in sales. Sales of Storage Infrastructure Software were up 10.8% year over year to $448 million. And Storage & Device Management Software sales were up 4.1% year over year to $708 million
Calsoft Inc. believes that the increase in volume of data and storage capacity to service it will remain strong. However, the key strategic task in the hands of IT managers would be availing data migrating services to third party cloud services. Also, the advent of cloud storage services is seen as a game changer. As clients are increasing their dependency on public cloud storage services, because of convenience, flexibility and cost- effectiveness it shall certainly push the need for data storage and management. On the other hand concerns related to complexity of migrating enterprise data to the cloud, along with worries over vendor lock-in, performance, data governance regulations and a lack of requisite skills in the IT department would be the space which solution providers would need to address depending on client requisites and IT environment of the their company.
To know more email: marketing@calsoftinc.com
