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This
is the 3rd year I've published the fastest growing storage companies list. This
year as the market is on the brink of recovery there were a lot more companies
to consider for inclusion. I also changed two important criteria for listing
companies compared to previous years.
- I shortened the qualifying period from a full year, down to as little as a
recent quarter. The storage landscape will change a lot in the second half of
2003. As we go through this transformation I think that short term indicators
are more reliable signals of what's happening.
- I removed the qualifying filter that a company had to be profitable
during the growth period. With recovery just round the corner and the weeding
out of weaker companies by 3 years of IT recession, I figured that even
conservatively managed companies might take a gamble on following growing
market demand now and leaving the profit side of othings to follow later.
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..........The fastest growing storage
companies in 2003.......... | |
| Companies
are listed in alphabetic order |
Supporting data |
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| ADIC |
May
15, 2003 – ADIC today announced sales for its second quarter ended April 30
exceeded $100 million. Sales were up almost 4% from the first quarter and up
nearly 25% from the same period last year. |
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| BakBone Software |
April
24, 2003 - BakBone Software reported preliminary revenue results for the fiscal
year ended March 31, 2003. Final reported results are expected to show revenue
in line with management's previous guidance of US$18.0 million to US$18.5
million, which represents growth in excess of 82% over revenues for the
previous fiscal year. |
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| Dell Computer |
Re:
quarter ended May 2, 2003 - Dell's Revenue from external storage systems was up
65%.
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| FalconStor Software |
April 24, 2003 - FalconStor
Software announced its financial results for the first quarter ended March 31,
2003. For the first quarter of 2003, net revenues increased 86% to $3.7
million, compared with the same period a year ago. |
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| McDATA |
May 29, 2003 -
McDATA reported revenue results of $103.2 million for its first quarter ended
April 30, 2003, reflecting a 60% year-over-year increase. |
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| M-Systems |
April 15, 2003 -
M-Systems announced financial results for the first quarter ended March 31,
2003. Revenues were $22.1 million, representing an increase of 7% compared to
the fourth quarter of 2002, and 93% compared to the first quarter of
2002. (For the year ended December 31, 2002, revenues increased by 45% to
$64.8 million, compared to revenues in 2001.) |
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| NSI
Software |
April
22, 2003 - Building on more than 100% revenue growth in CY2002, NSI Software
today announced that sales in the first quarter of 2003 grew
57% over the same quarter last year. |
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| Overland Storage |
April
24, 2003 – Overland Storage reported, for the quarter ended March 31,
2003, record revenue of $56.2 million an increase of 31% compared to
the prior fiscal year. |
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| QLogic |
April
29, 2003 - QLogic announced net revenues on a GAAP basis for the full fiscal
year 2003 were a record $440.8 million, up 28% from the $344.2 million
reported last year. |
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| Rambus |
April 14, 2003 -
Rambus reported financial results for its second fiscal quarter ended March 31,
2003. Revenue for the quarter was $28.1 million, up 19% over the same
period last year and up 9% from the previous quarter. |
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| SanDisk |
April 16, 2003 - SanDisk
announced results for its first quarter ended March 31, 2003. Total first
quarter revenues were $174.5 million, up 88% compared to the first
quarter of 2002. |
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| Silicon Image |
April 16, 2003 - Silicon
Image reported financial results for its first quarter ended March 31, 2003.
Record revenue of $24.7 million was achieved for this quarter. This is a 3.7%
percent increase over the $23.8 million achieved in the fourth quarter of 2002
and is a 44.4% increase over he first quarter of 2002. |
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| Western Digital |
April
24, 2003 - Western Digital Corp reported revenue of $706 million March 28,
2003 - year-over-year revenue growth of 19%.
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For an
experienced player like
Megabyte picking winners was
just a question
of pulling the right handles. | |
| .. |
| The Invisible Success
Stories |
| Privately owned companies present a
particular problem to compilers of this sort of list. I know of many storage
companies which have revenue growth as high or even higher than those listed in
this article. However, their owners did not want to signal to competitors how
well they were doing, and I have respected their wishes. |
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| Survival of the Fittest -
June 2003 |
Over 190 of the top 1,000 storage
companies which existed on January 1, 2000 have
gone bust, been acquired,
renamed or merged with another company. Despite that the total number of
active storage
manufacturers and storage
software companies has increased.
Although overall spending on
storage in 2002/3 increased at a modest level, some product segments gained
from the overall IT recession. As customers had smaller IT budgets to spend they
were more likely to adopt new technologies which simplified their operations,
cut down administration costs, made better use of assets or just made them
happy.
In the last category we're starting to see the consumer market
become an important multibillion dollar part of the storage market. In the long
term the consumer market has the capacity to overtake the spending on storage in
the IT market. But we're still about 3 to 5 years away from seeing terabyte disk
storage being as generally available in the home as CD players are today.
In
the storage software market,
Gartner
reported that the average revenue growth for companies outside the top 10
biggest (by revenue) was 15%. Many companies in the
solid state disk segment
experienced high revenue growth, but did not want to disclose details in this
article. In a related segment, driven by the cosumer entertainment market,
Gartner
reported 72% year on year revenue increase for the Removable Solid-State
Storage segment.
In a report last summer
Peripheral Concepts
predicted that spending on SAN
and NAS would grow 30% in
2003. So although there are still hundreds of "me too" companies in
networked storage, there's more enough spending to go around.
But not
everything in the storage market is rosy. The market for
tape libraries, which was
a high growth segment in 2001, experienced revenue decline in 2002 according to
Freeman Report. It's
not that large organisations have stopped doing backups, but STORAGEsearch
believes that disk to disk
backup has started to impact the tape market. I don't think the tape market
will ever get back to high revenue growth. Freeman Report predicts 7% growth
for the period 2004 to 2008. In a
recent article Sony
was bullish about the prospects for high end tape systems.
Another
year, another list... You can read your own runes by following up the links for
the fast growing companies named in this article. |
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