Billions Up For Grabs In Battle For Market Share

With the continuing rise in the number of companies starting to install storage-area networks (SANs), the term "network storage" is no longer a debatable term. It's a reality. So storage companies are vying for top-dog status in this market.

Based on VARBusiness' 2003 Annual Report Card research, IBM was able to nudge itself into the top spot in this year's network-storage category, with EMC coming in second and Hitachi Data Systems taking third. IBM deserves some kudos for this achievement, especially considering the company spent a lot of time during the late '90s playing catch-up with EMC because it had failed to foresee distributed storage as a growth market.

"IBM lost that market to EMC 10 years ago," says Andy Gorelik, COO at Strategic Computer Solutions, based in Syracuse, N.Y. "But I've seen IBM improve its storage. It's a better value in terms of price/performance, capacity, reliability and flexibility. Today, it's a completely different ball game."

Gorelik says that more and more customers are starting to ask for IBM, where in the past they would have looked at many different solutions. Basically, it was in the support and partnership subcategories that IBM was able to pull ahead as the winner. But it's interesting to note that when it came to product innovation and product reliability within the network storage category, EMC scored higher than IBM.

The only two criteria that the vendors actually tied on were postsales support and their solution-provider programs. But in the overall partnership subcategory, IBM was slightly ahead of EMC.

Still, solution providers say nothing can beat IBM's scientific research.

"They put so much in research and development, it's not funny," says Darren Waldrep, vice president of business development for Datatrend Technologies, Minnetonka, Minn.