According to a Tuesday Gartner industry report, IBM has surpassed Hewlett-Packard in 2006 global external-controller disk storage market, though it still trails industry leader EMC Corporation. IBM"s market share based on revenue, grew from 14.5% in 2005 to 15.8% in 2006, while HP"s share dropped to 13.1% from 14.7%. EMC gained market share to 24.8% last year from 23.4% in 2005. "I think the records will reflect that it"s been about 10 years since we passed HP," said Andy Monshaw, general manager of IBM storage. Monshaw credited a refreshed product line, a focus on selling systems rather than individual products and increased selling to the small-to-medium business market for IBM"s results.
The rest of the storage sellers in the report, ranked by 2006 market share, are the following: Hitachi Data Systems, at 9.6%, Dell at 7.6%, Network Appliance at 7.2% and Sun Microsystems at 6.1%. Gartner noted that the storage market is increasingly dominated by the top players and is driven by industry consolidation, more effective marketing and strong channel partnerships.