IBM, NetApp suffer as storage buyers shun mainstream suppliers The disruptive influence of the largest service providers ignoring mainstream suppliers when buying disk storage has been highlighted for the first time in stats from IDC - big brands should sit up and take note. The IDC tracker* reports on worldwide total disk storage and external storage array sales, and in Q3 included …
"A year ago IBM would have been the third-ranked vendor, but its revenues fell 7.2 per cent to $866m, giving it fourth place. Not so Big Blue is failing to keep up with modern storage technologies and its ageing product set has less and less appeal to customers."
I don't agree with the analysis of the cause. This has little to do with the products (XIV / V7K are fine and along with their SVC capability offer distinct advantages) and a lot to do with the fact that IBM decimated its internal sales / pre-sales organisation because it thought it could rely on the "channel". Fools.
Yeah, I agree with the comments. SVC is a fine appliance but it's extremely expensive and as a company's storage increases, it's just a tax on any storage environment.
A lot of the SVC functionality has been equaled or surpassed in the virtual world (eg Vmware) which makes it less viable.
As for the traditional SANs - XIV etc - IBM storage wasn't ever really sold: IBM customers BUY IBM stuff, but non-IBM customers don't buy IBM gear as they are being sold other vendor options.
As the IBM hardware installed base reduces - client, now x86 servers, industry decline in Unix it's a trend that's likely to continue.
We've seen what IBM's doing to meet earnings per share on their stock (by buying it back). When a company chooses to invest in its stock buybacks because it can't figure out where better to invest in sales growth, you can that this a company struggling.
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