EMC (
EMC
), the leading storage vendor in the world, has expanded its
product line to unified storage with its newly launched VNX storage
platform. This comes as a competitive product offering against
rival NetApp (
NTAP
), the dominant player in the unified storage market and the third
largest player in external disk storage market. Data storage is
among the fastest growing industries today and has witnessed
tremendous amount of activity over the past year and a half -
including a number of high profile acquisitions and an increased
focus on the sector from tech giants like HP (NYSE:HPQ), Dell (
DELL
) & IBM (NYSE:IBM) that are shifting to more cloud
services.
Unified Storage Growth
While most data center storage systems being shipped today still
use traditional block-based technology, there has been tremendous
growth in unstructured content such as digital media, which is
often stored in file-based systems.
Even as the balance is shifting to file-based storage a typical
enterprise will have to manage both types of storage for a long
time. Unified storage combines file-based and block-based
storage in one system and demand is increasing at a rapid rate.
EMC and NetApp's Storage Market Share
As EMC targets the unified storage market - among the fastest
growing segments in the data storage industry - the firm has the
opportunity to further expand its leading share in the external
data storage market (in GB).
In a scenarios where EMC's storage market share increases to 30%
by the end of the Trefis forecast period vs. 27% as we currently
forecast would result in upside of just around 5% to our
$37.60 price estimate for EMC
and a total implied upside of near 40% to the market price.
A higher storage hardware market share is also likely boost
storage software market share resulting in further upside potential
for EMC.
In the past NetApp has significantly gained share in the data
storage market driven by its industry leading unified storage
offerings. However, faced with competition from the storage market
leader EMC in its core unified storage market, NetApp may find it
increasingly hard to gain further market share.
In a scenario where NetApp's market share remains constant going
forward due to increased competition, in contrast to our current
forecast of growth, there could be a potential downside of 6% to
our
$53.79 Trefis price estimate for NetApp's stock
for an implied downside of around 10% to the market price.
See our complete model for NetApp
.