According to IDC, worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenues are down 5.6% from the prior year’s third quarter and down 4.1 % from the second quarter of 2013.
IBM and HP saw the biggest slump as their sales dropped over 11% for IBM and over 10% for HP. Of the top five vendors (EMC, HP, IBM, Dell and NetApp), NetApp was the only one to show an increase in revenue, however their market share is still the smallest.
At Maximum Midrange, we did see a small slump on refurb external disk storage during the third quarter that seems to have come from the freeze on Federal spending during October, as it rebounded within 30 days after President Obama signed the shutdown-ending bill on October 17.
While external disk system sales were slipping, the Ethernet switch market increased by 6.5%, which we think could point to data moving to the cloud instead of traditional on-site storage. Could a combination of the government shut-down and the increase in Ethernet switch sales be a factor in the slip of disk storage sales?
It will be interesting to see the Q1 and Q2 2014 results when those become available.
Sales Woes For External Disk Storage Systems