Dell and HPE in storage struggle as ODMs surge

Market-leading duo suffer as ODMs tighten grip on enterprise storage

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Dell saw their storage leaderships take a hit in Q2, according to IDC.

The market watcher's enterprise storage tracker claims that HPE saw its enterprise storage revenue drop 13.2 per cent year on year to $2.2bn, while Dell's revenue plummeted 26.7 per cent over the same period, to just under $2bn.

Dell's decline sees it lose its crown as the dominant market player. In Q2 last year, Dell held the largest market share of any vendor at 25.9 per cent, but has now seen a drop to 18.4 per cent.

HPE saw the largest revenue share at 20.1 per cent (a decline of 3.7 percentage points) but the ODM vendors saw their share rocket from 13.8 per cent to 23.3 per cent - while their revenue jumped 73.5 per cent to $2.5bn.

Liz Conner, storage research manager at IDC, said: "The enterprise storage market finished the second quarter of 2017 on a positive note, posting modest year-over-year growth and the first overall growth in several quarters.

"Traditional storage vendors continue to expand their product portfolios to take advantage of the market swing towards all flash, converged and hyper-converged systems.

"Meanwhile, hyperscalers saw new storage initiatives and event-driven storage requirements lead to strong growth in this segment during the second quarter."

Despite the struggles of Dell and HPE, the overall enterprise storage revenue was up 2.9 per cent year on year to $10.8bn.

NetApp was the biggest winner with revenue up 16.7 per cent, but still some way behind HPE and Dell at $694.6m.

Sales of server-based storage were however down 13.4 per cent to $2.9bn. External storage remained the largest segment of the market, despite seeing sales decline 5.4 per cent, at $5.3bn.