The Devil is in the details
While the article analyzes revenue, it leaves out something that should be equally as important, IDC’s reported capacity shipped. According to IDC, in Q212 for Networked (SAN+NAS) storage EMC shipped $1.7B (33%), NetApp shipped $726M (14%) and IBM shipped $634 (12.3%). Of that same storage shipped, the IDC capacity numbers tell a different story. EMC shipped 1.114PB (27%) where NetApp shipped 833TB (20%) and IBM shipped 422TB (10%). While EMC still shipped more raw capacity, it did so at a rate that was much more expensive ($1,526/TB) than NetApp ($871/TB) and IBM at ($1,502/TB) was also significantly more expensive than NetApp. Some things to consider is that NetApp may be trying to buy market share with lower price or it could simply be less expensive. Additionally because all of NetApp’s storage has Deduplication, NetApp customers may have needed to buy less raw disk to get the same usable capacity and in fact NetApp may have shipped more effective capacity than EMC when you factor in that Deduplication. NetApp claims 43% average Deduplication across all customers and all data meaning that they would have shipped 1.307PB or 15% more effective capacity than EMC at a far less costly $555/TB when you factor in Deduplication. Net is revenue numbers don’t always tell the whole story.