'Running circles around everyone else' Michael Dell taunts storage competitors on Twitter

CEO tweets image of Wall Street Journal ad which shows Dell's storage lead over rivals

Dell claimed it was "running circles" around its rivals in a front page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal.

Michael Dell (pictured) tweeted the ad, which displayed figures from analyst IDC, showing the vendor's dominance in the external enterprise storage space against rivals NetApp, HPE and IBM.

The figures in the ad are based on IDC figures from the first to third quarters of 2018.

The analyst's recent Q4 data, published on the same day as Dell's ad, showed that Dell Inc topped the external enterprise storage leaderboard, holding a 30.3 per cent share globally last year.

Dell grew 23 per cent year on year to revenues of $2.3bn (£1.7bn) in Q4, ahead of NetApp and HPE, which jointly held second place with market shares of 10.9 per cent and 10.6 per cent respectively.

IBM, Hitachi and Huawei rounded out the top five.

Dell also took the crown in the total worldwide enterprise storage market for the same period, generating $2.9bn, which represents a 20.6 per cent share of the market.

HPE took second place with an 18 per cent market share, followed by NetApp and IBM in joint third, with Huawei, Lenovo and Hitachi jointly rounding out the top five.

Revenues for the global enterprise storage market grew more than seven per cent to $14.5bn in the fourth quarter of 2018, according to IDC's data.