Sun Edges Out Market-Share Leader EMC

Sun Microsystems emerged the victor in the network storage category in this year's VARBusiness Annual Report Card (ARC). Sun's overall score of 77 was only two points ahead of second-place contender Compaq. EMC was close behind Compaq with a score of 74, followed by Hewlett-Packard and IBM, each scoring 72 overall for the category.

Impressive is the fact that Sun not only won the overall category honor, but also scored victories in all three of the network storage subcategories: products/pricing, support and partnership.

Joe Womack, vice president of central area sales, says Sun's wins are a testament to the company's heritage as a network-focused business. Competitor EMC, Womack says, has been a leader in this area for some time with its position that customers have to decide on a separate holding vessel for their critical data. With that storage-centric philosophy, "EMC has had a heck of a rocket ship for five or six years," Womack says.

But now, particularly in the past six months or so, Womack says customers have come full circle in their thinking about storage-area networks (SANs) and network-attached storage (NAS). He says they have begun to realize there are network implications to high-end storage decisions. He notes they have begun to ask questions about the application server that manages and retrieves the data, and are considering storage a component of the overall network rather than a decision to be made in isolation. "It's no longer accurate to just say, 'Hey, go make your storage decision in the corner and that's all that matters,'" Womack says. "The other components are a lot more critical to an enterprise's management of its data," he says, adding that those components make up Sun's sweet spot.

Having a network-focused approach to high-end storage sales doesn't just work well for Sun. It works for Compaq, too. The vendor, which took second place overall in this year's storage competition, has some enthusiastic supporters of its philosophy.

Vincent Gagliano, a systems design engineer for Manchester Technologies, a Hauppauge, N.Y.-based solution provider, says partnering with a vendor such as Compaq, which offers both server and storage solutions, rather than a vendor like EMC, which only offers storage, "makes it a whole lot easier to present an across-the-board solution" to customers.

But EMC predictably insists the opposite is true. Although EMC posted a third-place overall score in the network storage category, executives at the Hopkinton, Mass.-based company say independent market research shows EMC is the clear market leader in high-end network information storage, and is the only storage provider with a major presence in both the SAN and NAS markets.

Focusing on storage alone rather than selling both servers and storage products gives EMC an advantage, says Gregg Ambulos, EMC's vice president of global channels. "It's not a server-centric world anymore," Ambulos says. "In businesses where information is the central point of their universe, you've got to be able to access the data, and that's what we provide," he explains. "People look to put best-of-breed servers on the floor and best-of-breed storage [to support them], and clearly EMC is best-of-breed storage."

Part 3: Developmental Milestones

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