possible oops?
"In Big Blue’s fourth 2016 quarter..."
Is that an mistake, as we're not even a twelfth of the way in to 2016 :D
Alie
For IBM, storage value is moving to software, with object storage and flash growing while legacy disk and tape products see revenue falls. In Big Blue’s fourth 2016 quarter overall revenues dropped nine per cent but storage hardware revenues fared worse, dropping 11.1 per cent, with no end in sight. This continues a trend …
No one is really doing well. HP was up last quarter, the only major storage provider that was up, but that was probably more of an anomaly than anything else. It is just a rough world in storage. The prices have been falling through the floor for the last few years... and there are about half a dozen start ups (Pure, Tintri, Nimble, Tegile, Nutanix, Infinidat) which are gaining share on the five major players (EMC, IBM, HP, HDS and NetApp)... and the cloud (meaning AWS and Azure) are growing rapidly... and VMware/Microsoft are advocating server side storage architectures. Other than that, a great place to be.
Generally speaking, no one bought IBM storage unless they were an IBM shop (mainframe, unix servers, large bladecenter shops, etc.). That there are increasingly fewer IBM hardware shops around due to IBM getting out of the x86 server business, Unix-> Windows/Linux migrations, etc. ipso facto fewer storage sales.