Tintri: EMC's market lead is under threat

Rival claims market leader could struggle to maintain its share let alone grow it in light of success for start-ups

Storage start-up Tintri has warned EMC that its plans to further dominate the storage market could be under threat.

Last week at its EMC World event, the industry heavyweight declared that it was not happy with its 30 per cent share of the storage market, and claimed to be eyeing up the remaining 70 per cent too.

But smaller rival Tintri, which was set up in 2008 and launched a campaign to expand its EMEA operations in 2011, believes that EMC's technical and strategic ambitions might not be as successful as they hope.

Tintri's vice president for EMEA Marcus Chambers (pictured) suggested that EMC's hold on the market is under threat.

He said: "EMC is right in identifying the continued growth opportunity in the storage market, but one wonders if EMC should be worried about how it is going to keep its market share, let alone grow it, in the face of an incredible amount of storage innovation being brought to the market every day by other companies; especially all the well-funded storage start-up companies.

"Granted, EMC will continue to release new products, but it is a different ball game when your portfolio of products [is] fundamentally based on legacy architectures, some of which are almost 20 years old.

"Retrofitting legacy storage with new software layers to become more virtualisation-friendly cannot deliver the most efficient approach. Bolting on flash is not the answer either."

Tintri is not the first storage start-up to throw stones at EMC, as earlier this year, recent EMEA market entrant Pure Storage claimed to be on a mission to dethrone the market leader.

Throughout 2012, IDC's External Disk Storage Systems Quarterly Tracker showed that sequential revenue for the top six vendors declined steadily, while the combined sales for the "others" category grew.

By the final quarter of 2012, revenue for the "others" category reached $2.1bn (£1.37bn), and surpassed the like-for-like sales of EMC for the first time, while sales for the top six storage vendors dropped sequentially from $4.9bn to $3.8bn between quarters two and four.

Chambers added: "It will be fun to watch as Tintri and other storage start-ups continue to shake up the storage market with the kind of innovation that causes major market disruptions.

"[It will be] good for customers, but maybe not so good for established incumbents."