Storage market picks up

BEANCOUNTERS at IDC say they have spotted encouraging signs of a turnaround in the enterprise storage systems market.

Worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenues posted a 10.0 per cent decline year over year, totalling $4.4 billion in the third quarter of 2009, according to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker.

With figures like that analysts usually put on sack cloth and ashes and start talking about doom and other cheery subjects, particularly when the total disk storage systems market declined to $6.0 billion in revenues, a 9.6 per cent decline from the prior year's third quarter, driven by continued weakness in server systems sales.

However after shuffling the tarot cards, IDC fortune tellers think that the rate of decline has started to slow. This is the sort of news that an industry that has seemed to be falling without a parachute needs to hear.

Steve Scully, research manager, Enterprise Storage at IDC, said that the market experienced a sequential gain over the previous quarter, with many of the top storage vendors posting increases.

EMC maintained its lead in the external disk storage systems market with 24.2 per cent revenue share in the third quarter, followed by IBM with 13.2 per cent share. HP ended the quarter in third position with 11.8 per cent market share. Dell and NetApp finished the quarter in a tie for fourth place.

So everything is alright, yes, everything is fine, as they sang in Jesus Christ Superstar - just before they nailed him up. µ