Indian ECB revenues total $30 million in Q2 2005: Gartner

Mumbai: External disk storage revenues in Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) totaled $373 million in the second quarter of 2005 registering over 9-per cent growth in revenues over the January- March quarter 2005, says Gartner Inc. As a result, APEJ remained the fastest growing region for ECB storage in the world. Additionally, the share of APEJ as a percentage of world-wide shipments also witnessed a continual increase during the same time period.

For the external controller-based disk storage, India narrowly edged past Taiwan as the fourth largest storage market in the APEJ region, both in unit shipments and spending terms in April-June quarter of 2005, The Indian market totaled $30.01 million in the second quarter of 2005.

HP continued to lead the storage market in India with a 22 per cent share of revenues. EMC followed second with 19.6-per cent share of revenues. IBM with 18.3 per cent value share completed the top three in the Indian market. Telecom, banking and CSI were the three primary markets for storage in India and accounted for 32 per cent, 19 per cent and 15-per cent share of revenues, respectively.

In Q2 2005, China, Australia and Korea with 32 per cent, 18.4 per cent and 14.6 per cent respective share in revenues, remained, the leading storage markets within APEJ. India narrowly edged past Taiwan as the fourth largest Storage market in APEJ, both in unit shipments and spending terms.

ECB storage revenue in Australia totaled $68.6 million in the second quarter of 2005. The amount of external disk storage capacity shipped in the same period was an impressive 5,034 terabytes. Likewise, storage figures in China totaled 10,949 Terabytes for $119.2 million. Shipment figures in Korea and India totaled $54.4 and U$ 30.0 million, respectively.

Table 1

² Hitachi/HDS revenue excludes OEM revenue from HP and Sun.
Source: Gartner Dataquest Disk Array Quarterly Statistics Q2-2005

Despite losing market share for the second quarter in succession, HP managed to hold a decent lead over its competitors and maintained a firm hold on its market leadership position in the region. The market leader's revenues grew two per cent sequentially to total $82.9 million during AMJ 2005.

Market share figures dropped from 23.8 per cent in the first quarter of the year to 22.3 per cent in second quarter. "Strong performances in Australia, China and Korea were imperative for the vendor's performance in the region said Aman Munglani, Principle Analyst for Storage. "Market leadership positions in comparatively smaller markets that include India, Hong Kong and Taiwan further helped substantiate Hp's numbers."

Maintaining market positions from the last quarter, EMC and IBM totaled 19.1 per cent and 18.1 per cent, revenue share respectively. Interestingly, EMC that grew 10.2 per cent over the last quarter was the fastest growing vendor among the top three players.

"EMC seems to be considerably lagging behind leaders in markets such as China, Australia and Taiwan and an increase in revenues in these markets is critical to their market performance," adds Munglani. IBM on the other hand leads the ECB market in China with more than 20-per cent share of revenues and came second only to Hewlett-Packard in Hong Kong and Taiwan. "Among the bigger markets, IBM needs to concentrate on Korea and Australia to increase its overall positioning in the region" he says.

Dell continued to make significant inroads into the Asia Pacific markets, closing the quarter on a high, the vendors revenues increased near 53 per cent on a sequential basis to total $34 million in the second quarter. Moreover, the vendor also achieved a near 2.5-per cent increase in revenue share over the preceding quarter. The CX series continues to account for a major chunk of Dell's shipments and totalled 77 per cent of all Dell machines installed in the APEJ region last quarter.

Sun Microsystems maintained its position from last quarter but enjoyed the distinction of being the second fastest growing vendor in the APEJ region last quarter. The vendor's revenues in AMJ 2005 grew 39 per cent for an 8.6 per cent share of APEJ revenues. Strong performances in Australia, India and China were imperative to the growth seen in values for this vendor. Moreover a large part of the growth could be apportioned to a significant surge in shipments seen in the low end of its successful StorEdge 3000 series

Network Appliance posted another quarter of strong growth in the region. The Vendor's numbers totaled 17.92 Million for 4.8 per cent share of revenues in the APEJ region. Australia and India continued to be their two largest markets in the region and together accounted for almost 57 per cent of Network Appliance revenues in the APEJ region.