External Storage Capacity Sales in CEMA Surged 40% in 3Q12 From 3Q11

The external storage market in Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (CEMA) accelerated its growth in the third quarter of 2012 and reached 304.7PB, which represents an increase of 40.0% year on year.

According to market research and advisory company IDC, end-user spending on external storage increased in the same period by almost 18% to $501 million.

The growth surge of the market is attributed mainly to the performance of second-tier and local vendors.

Major players including EMC, HP, and IBM continued to dominate the market. However, for the first time since 2006, they captured less than 70% combined market value share.

EMC maintained the leading position, with 35.7% market share based on 13.6% growth over Q3 2011. HP returned to second place at 17.3%, and IBM ranked third with 15.2%. The latter two vendors increased shipments compared to the third quarter of 2011, but by less than 4%.

"The competition on the storage market intensified as second-tier international and local vendors in the largest CEMA countries performed better than the market average," says Pavel Roland, IDC’s research manager for storage systems in the CEMA region. "The majority of these vendors posted two- and three-digit value growth due to making significant inroads into the government segment, as well as increasing shipments to large and medium-sized businesses."

"In terms of open networked storage performance, the NAS market grew faster than in the second quarter of 2012, to significantly outperform open SAN systems," says Marina Kostova, storage systems research analyst with IDC CEMA. "The factors behind this development were the increasing number of new multiprotocol solutions, vendors adding NAS capability to existing SAN storage, and small industry players targeting SMBs with affordable, easy-to-use NAS systems."