My methodology was simply to
compile a short list of contenders (the top 30 or so companies at the time)
look at the trends in the market segments they were in - and from that deduce
which were the most likely to go up or down. The articles included commentaries
for each company and the storage market - just to make things more interesting.
But
I stopped work on the series after 2005.
There were 2 reasons for
this.
(1) - I was doing a lot of fundamental market research and
designing and testing
market models
of the SSD market.
(2) -
November 22, 2005
I reported that a Pivotal Shift had taken place in the Storage Market
in 2005 from which the quote below is taken. |
| ..... |
"2005 was the year that semiconductor
storage overtook all other technologies (including disk) to become the biggest
segment (more than 50%) of the storage market.
In 2005 solid state storage accounted for $45 billion of revenue. That
was made up of RAM ($25 billion) and flash ($20 billion). It's the first time in
the history
of the computer market that solid state storage (with no moving parts) was worth
about the same (or more) than all the other types of storage media added
together (hard disk drives, tape and optical storage media).
That's a fundamental shift in the landscape which is not going to
change. And as the solid state storage market grows and becomes more
sophisticated - it will make big changes to the way that computers are designed
and maintained." |
..... | |
I realised that as disruptive
changes were going to occur in the 2009, 2010, 2011 storage markets - the old
method of predicting the biggest storage companies wouldn't work any more.
That's
because (if I was right about the solid state storage market) then many of the
top 10 companies would have to have revenues from a segment which most
of them hadn't even entered yet!
This didn't put me out of the
prediction
game. Far from it. But I mostly stuck to general technology or market
trends, instead of comparative revenue predictions for specific companies.
How
could anyone (back in 2006) predict how much SSD revenue companies like
EMC or
Sun would have in 2009 -
years before they launched any such products?
I did feel quite
pleased though that I had predicted in 2004 (4 years before it was announced)
that Sun would
be the first server company to offer SSDs as standard options throughout its
server line.
And it was easy to see that one big storage oem would
definitely not go down the SSD route - as I wrote in my 2007 article -
Why Seagate
will Fail the SSD Challenge.
So where does all that leave
predictions for the the 10 biggest storage companies in 2012?
Within
the SSD segment you may be able to predict which companies will be most
successful within their own niches (of
flash SSD,
RAM SSD etc) by
analyzing movements in the quarterly tracker called
the Top 10 SSD Companies
- which has been running for over a year as I write this.
In 3 or 4
years' time when all the solid state storage market disruption starts to
settle down and when SSDs become part of the standard college curriculum about
computer architecture alongside cache, multiprocessing etc - it may be time to
pick up the theme again and predict the top 10 storage companies in 2015.
Until
then just keep tuned to storage
news and if anything becomes clear - you'll see it there first. |
| ......................................................................................................... | |
|
| . |
| archived copies
of this article from earlier years
| |
| . |
| Need SSD
Acceleration ASAP? - new article on SSD ASAPs |
| Editor:- December 28, 2009 -
StorageSearch.com recently
published a new article which discusses
the pros and cons of
using SSD ASAPs - Auto-tuning SSD Accelerated Pools of storage. |
 |
How can server users easily
decide if they should ignore these products - or spend more time looking at
them? It's going to be a huge market. ...read the article | | |
| . |
|
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