Dell EMC Storage Dominating Over HPE And NetApp Worldwide

Dell EMC’s storage charge is paying off as the infrastructure giant has widened its worldwide market share gap over Hewlett Packard Enterprise and NetApp in the second quarter of 2018, according to new data from IDC.

For the second quarter of 2018, Dell captured 19.1 percent of the global storage market share, up from 18.3 percent year over year, according to IDC. Dell generated $2.52 billion in enterprise storage sales in the quarter, representing a nearly 27 revenue increase compared to the same quarter one year ago.

"They have a really motivating channel program, a strong portfolio across the board, a [Future Proof Storage] Loyalty program that customers are loving – Michael Dell's big bet on EMC is now coming to fruition," said Scott Winslow, president of Winslow Technology Group, a Waltham, Mass.-based Dell partner and CRN 2017 Triple Crown Award winner. "They do have additional channel incentives if you take out competitive gear, whether it's HPE, NetApp or others, that is definitely motivating and we've been involved in several of those opportunities."

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HPE's worldwide storage market share dropped from 20.6 percent in second quarter 2017 to 17.3 percent share. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based vendor's storage sales slightly increased from $2.25 billion to $2.28 billion, representing a 2 percent increase year over year.

NetApp captured 6.3 percent of the global market share in the second quarter 2018, down from 6.4 percent share in the same quarter last year. Although NetApp's market share slightly fell, the company increased storage revenue from $695 million to $832 million year over year.

Dell partners said their storage numbers are increasing this year for several reasons, including better synergies between the legacy Dell and legacy EMC sales teams and channel incentives to replace competitor solutions.

"There's very much an emphasis on attacking non-Dell storage install bases," said Josh Lee, director of sales for Nanuet, N.Y.-based Dell partner VirtuIT Systems. "There's a lot of incentives in the partner community and in the Dell rep community to take out competitive install bases. There's a lot of great programs in the Dell partner world to go do that."

Dell storage sales for VirtuIT Systems are up more than 20 percent already in 2018 compared to the previous year. Michael Murphy, president and founder of VirtuIT Systems, said storage sales are exploding due to strong demand for Dell's hyper-converged infrastructure solutions VxRail and VxRack.

Dell is enabling VirtuIT to sell "millions" in hyper-converged sales this year by providing complete VxRail training for partners, said Murphy.

"What we're leveraging a lot of is the VxRail Test Drives. It’s a Dell program where we do a full day of training and overview of what the VxRail value proposition is. So it gets the customers hands on it before they buy it," said Murphy. "They walk away understanding exactly what the value of the solution is, what the benefit is and what type of savings it will bring. We do phenomenally well when we go through that ride with customers."

On Thursday, Round Rock, Texas-based Dell Technologies reported that storage sales for its second fiscal quarter 2019 increased 13 percent year over year to $4.2 billion.

"We've made a lot of changes in our primary storage business over the past year. The product line is far more competitive today," said Jeff Clarke, vice chairman, products and operations at Dell, during the company's second fiscal quarter earnings call. "Demand was up in file-based arrays, high-end storage and data protection offerings. Our focus remains on driving velocity in the midrange as this is a key area of growth in the array segment."

Dell storage sales for Winslow Technology Group for the first half of 2018 were up 30 percent year over year. Winslow pointed at Dell's Future Proof Storage Loyalty Program as a significant competitive and channel incentive advantage. The program, launched in November, enables partners to give customers a three-year, money-back guarantee; a storage efficiency guarantee; trade-in credits towards new Dell EMC storage products; and a 10 percent allocation and one year of built-in Virtustream Storage Cloud on Unity all-flash products, to name a few incentives.

"That program is helping a lot. They have a clause in there that says any upgrade that they make in the future will be non-disruptive," said Winslow. "Overall, it’s making their solutions more cost effective and eliminating risk for customers."

According to IDC, total worldwide enterprise storage sales increased 21 percent year over year to $13.2 billion during the second quarter. Total capacity shipments were up 70 percent year over year to 111.8 exabytes.