Who are the top 10
most important SSD manufacturers - the companies which you absolutely have to
look at if you've got got any new projects involving SSDs?
A decade ago
there was an easy answer. "All of them!"
It wasn't till 1999
that our online
SSD directory tipped over
the 10 companies mark. Today (July 2007) there
are over 55 active listed SSD oems. Another 4 or so I know in stealth
mode, another 10 I'm checking out as imminent maybes and I expect the total
number of SSD oems to go north of 100 in
2008. The new
storage gold rush is chasing an opportunity for storage systems companies that
could eventually be worth
5 to 10 billion
dollars a year. And this is a market in which the "usual suspects"
EMC, IBM, HP are nowhere. So in theory anyone could end up dominating this
market. |
|
| It's not that simple. Because
there's already a lot of traction. Stakes have been put in the ground claiming
desirable application or technology territories. A handful of SSD pioneers have
already exited the market, gone bust or been
acquired. |
|
To go back to the question -
which are the most important SSD oems to look at right now? There are 2
empirical ways to form such a list based on different
market research
approaches.
(1) - financial data - looks at revenue and
shipping volumes. The problem with this approach in a market that's growing so
fast - is that revenue data can be 3 to 6 months out of date when collected and
may not sample any data at all from important new companies which
have recently entered the market. This traditional approach will probably work
fine from about the middle of 2009 onwards. And if you can afford to wait that
long before choosing SSD
partners / suppliers that's OK. But is it really? I think waiting that long
is very risky. Many companies will be at a severe competitive disadvantage if
their competitors are using SSD technology first. Faster SSD accelerated
ecommerce sites, faster databases and new SSD powered business applications
will mean that waiting too long to hit the SSD trail could be damaging to your
competitiveness. |
| (2) - search volume data
- is a near real-time and (nearly) reliable way to see which way things are
heading in changing markets. I've got strong confidence in this approach having
used it as an online publisher for over a decade to help me make predictions
about emerging technologies and disruptions in the storage market. But search
volume based market inferences only work if you have high volumes of search in
the specific subject. That's why you're here... Because when it comes to SSDs
STORAGEsearch.com has delivered
millions of article views related to hard SSD content and our readership is
growing fast. We've also been discussing the SSD market with nearly every SSD
manufacturer (sometimes before they founded their companies) and with analysts
and interested readers in a wide range of enterprises longer than any other
publisher or analyst. |
The Top 10 SSD
OEMs
The listing below is based on storage search volume
on this site. This metric samples strong follow up interest generated by
browsing our SSD directories, following up news stories or articles and
following links from ads. But it excludes the pageviews of product ads
themselves. As we track every manufacturer in the market and any manufacturer
can (and does) send us their content related to SSDs - this is a measure of how
our readers have reacted to that content. |
