Top 12 Storage Companies in 2015

Our ranking is based on official figures of companies publishing their number on storage only for their fiscal year ended one of the month of calendar year 2015.

For the first time, global revenue of the biggest storage companies decreased in 2015.

For our annual top ones it was 5% from 2012 to 2013, 9% from 2013 to 2014, and here -3% from 2014 to 2015. 2016 could also be a negative period for several of huge firms in subsystems and software having difficulties to compensate their traditional portfolio with new offering, especially expansive SSD platforms and low-cost software-defines storage where they are many smaller firms in competition.

EMC continues to be #1 in storage. It’s the case since 2004 but this time down 1.5% in 2015 compared to a tiny 2% growth in 2014. It’s worst for rival NetApp at -5%, at 0% in 2014 and 2% in 2013.

At -4%, HP and HDS are not doing better, Dell is at -5% and IBM (-10%) continues to record catastrophic years, falling from number 5 in 2012 to number 9 one in last year in the top list.

It was also a bad year for HDD makers having difficulties to compete with SSDs. This trend will also continue this year.

Concerning flash, Micron was up 80% in 2014 and down 1% in 2015. It does not mean that the flash market is in bade shape. That’s the contrary and some other big actors like Samsung and Toshiba are doing much better but are not ranked here as they don’t publish financial results on their flash chips and SSDs.

Avago is entering in the list here following acquisitions of several firms in connectivity products these last two years: LSI, PLX and Emulex, for a total of 7.5 billion.

The only firm with positive results (only 1%) is Symantec seeing most of its storage activity now under the umbrella of Veritas Technologies.

Our ranking is going to be largely modified in 2016 because of two huge acquisitions. With SanDisk, Western Digital could top the list in front of Dell with EMC, then Micron and Seagate.

All top 12 companies below record more than $1.4 billion in storage revenue.

• Samsung, no more directly in HDDs, could merit to be included in the Top 12 but the company does not precisely publish revenue in NAND flash chips and SSDs.
• It’s also the case Toshiba involved in HDDs, SSDs (also with OCZ) and flash chips.

• Here storage is defined as the activity of recording and retrieving computer data using any form of digital devices (based on magnetic, tape, optical, non volatile solid-state – not RAM -, and subsystems) including all associated connectivity, software and services.
• For this ranking we used the companies’ financial results for their fiscal year 2015 – not the calendar year – ending in any month of 2015. We got official figures – not estimations – for all of them and for storage only.