North American Enterprise Storage Buyers Prefer EMC And Systems Vendors

Forrester annually asks IT infrastructure buyers about their storage providers. We learned that half of enterprises in North America are customers of EMC and nearly as many also buy from Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM. To get beyond the simple statistics of vendor popularity, we looked at the number and combinations of vendors with which enterprises work. Many were customers of one or two storage providers, but the rest were customers of up to six storage providers. More than one-third were customers of systems vendors only, bypassing storage specialists. Based on large differences in customer preference, we conclude that EMC, HP, and IBM will duke it out as storage generalists, while Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), Network Appliance (NetApp), and Sun Microsystems will have to choose whether to specialize in specific markets or strain to get in the game with other full-line storage providers.