12% Y/Y for External Storage Market in CEMA in 2012 – IDC

The external storage market in Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (CEMA) ranked among the fastest growing globally in 2012.

Even though the fourth quarter proved to be very challenging, with almost flat revenue performance, the market demonstrated a double-digit growth rate of 11.6% year on year. In absolute terms, the systems shipped generated revenues of $2,014 million, representing a total capacity of 1,189.6PB. The capacity increased by 33.9% year on year, at half the 2011 pace, as the market showed some reluctance to restore the dollar per gigabyte decline trend to previous levels.

     Total CEE and MEA External Disk Storage Market
           YoY Vendor Market Share Change (Value)

EMC’s revenue grew year on year faster than the market average to capture a market value share of 38.6%, thereby exceeding the combined market share of the next two contenders. EMC’s results were influenced mainly by large project wins in Russia and some countries in the Middle East. IBM and HP captured 17.1% and 16.6% of the market, respectively.

IBM reported a 7.9% increase in revenues over 2011, largely due to the success of the Storwize product line.

HP’s revenues stagnated because of losses incurred due to the phasing out of the EVA systems and the company’s inability to repeat the success of its high-end XP family. 3PAR performance was outstanding, but failed to help HP achieve overall growth.

Most vendors recorded double-digit revenue growth year-on-year, with Fujitsu and DataDirect Networks multiplying their market shares in the Middle East region, albeit from a small base.

"If we considered 2011 to be the year of high-end storage in the region, then 2012 was the year of the midrange solutions," states Pavel Roland, IDC’s research manager for storage systems in the CEMA region. "There is a notable shift to lower price bands by enterprise users on one side, and enterprise capabilities previously only available in high-end systems, now offered by vendors at midrange prices, on the other."

According to IDC, midrange storage class shipments accounted for 55.0% share of total market value.

The CEMA external storage market witnessed strong demand from large and medium-sized businesses, as well as from the public sector in 2012.

"CIS countries invested heavily in public storage projects," observes Marina Kostova, storage systems research analyst with IDC CEMA. "Many CEMA organizations from the enterprise segment transitioned from dedicated to scalable unified storage solutions, which were already a standard proposition in all major vendors’ portfolios."

IDC’s Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Quarterly Tracker analyzes the global disk storage market in over 70 countries. The Tracker includes quarterly shipment and revenue data by units, factory revenue, customer revenue, terabytes, $/GB, and GB/Unit. Each criterion is segmented by location, installation base, OS, vendor, family, model, and region.