History 2002: Disk Storage Systems Market Declines Astounding 18% in 2001

After years of healthy growth in the disk storage systems hardware market, IDC believes the market declined an astounding $5.7 billion (18.2%) in 2001.

This is the first decline in this market since 1998, according to its recently published study 2001 Disk Storage Systems Forecast and Analysis, 2000-2005.

“Several converging forces fueled this decline, including the demise of many dot-coms, intense price-competition in the U.S., and recession related spending cutbacks. Further Aberdeen Group contributing to the revenue decrease in this market are the efficiencies recently gained from storage and server consolidation,” explained Charlotte Rancourt, IDC’s research director storage systems.

She believes that the current US economic downturn will impact other regions of the world during 2002.

While the US storage system market is expected to recover in the latter half of 2002, IDC estimates the WW market will decline 1.7% in 2002 as the US downturn ripples throughout the world.

The report expects the WW disk storage system market to grow 5.2% in 2003.

Despite overall market declines, pockets of growth can be found within some segments of the disk storage system market. Networked storage systems sales (comprised of NAS and SAN), for example, are expected to grow 8.3% in 2001, reaching almost $8.5 billion in market revenue. This growth is fueled by the benefits of storage consolidation and the need for efficient management of storage infrastructure resources.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 169 on February 2002 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.