| Top SSD
Companies - © StorageSearch.com | |
based on
reader search in the 4th Quarter 2012 |
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| rank.... |
company |
top related segments |
notes........................................................... |
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| 1 |
Fusion-io |
PCIe SSDs
SSD software |
Same as before.
This is
Fusion-io's 16th straight quarter at #1.
Fusion-io's search volume
is 2x the level of the #2 ranked company in this list.
Among
other things Fusion-io reported 59% year on year revenue growth for the
quarter ended September 30, 2012. |
|
| 2 |
STEC |
enterprise component SSDs...
industrial SSDs
military SSDs |
Same as before.
In this quarter
STEC announced that its revenue for the quarter ended September 30 was 57%
lower than the same quarter 3 years before. In the same 3 year period the
available SSD market had grown about 8x bigger. |
|
| 3 |
Violin Memory |
rackmount SSDs
HA SSDs |
Same as before.
In this period
there was more speculation than usual that Violin was preparing for an IPO. |
|
| 4 |
OCZ |
PCIe SSDs
SAS SSDs
consumer SSDs |
Same as before.
As part of its company recovery strategy following the loss of its CEO
and SEC filing problems reported in the previous quarter OCZ slimmed down its
catalog and headcount and made strenuous efforts to convince observers that
it was focusing on the more promising business segments in its product and
customer mix. |
|
| 5 |
Skyera |
adaptive R/W
rackmount SSDs |
Up 2 places since the last quarter.
This
is the highest ranking ever for Skyera.
Although few people on this
planet really understand the complex mix of technologies which Skyera has
mastered to architect one of the world's most
efficiently
engineered SSD arrays - almost anyone can easily appreciate the results when
they're presented with the resulting price and performance.
One of the
frustrations for Skyera, however, is that demonstrating reliability and apps
compatibility as a newcomer to the mission critical systems market - can't be
rushed. |
|
| 6 |
WhipTail |
rackmount SSDs
HA SSDs |
Same as before.
In December
2012 - WhipTail announced it had secured $31 million series C funding from a
group of investors which included
SanDisk. |
|
| 7 |
LSI |
SSD controllers
PCIe SSDs |
Up 1 place since the last quarter.
LSI
moved its stock listing from NYSE to NASDAQ and also said that any
improvement in the ultrabook market would be good for its SSD controller
business too. |
|
| 8 |
Texas Memory Systems... |
rackmount SSDs
HA SSDs
PCIe SSDs |
Down 3 places since the last quarter.
Although
nothing dramatically new was announced by TMS in its first full quarter as
an IBM company - there were already signs that the "SSD secret sauce"
absorption was already underway when the TMS product line appeared in a
strategic IBM presentation at the Server Design Summit.
(And for
people who communicate with TMS another sure sign of steady progress is that
they all have new shiny IBM domain email addresses.) |
|
| 9 (tie) |
Virident Systems |
PCIe SSDs |
Same as before.
Virident
announced the general availability of its previously unveiled FlashMAX II -
fast enterprise PCIe SSDs. |
|
| 9 (tie) |
SMART |
SAS SSDs |
Up 2 places since the last quarter.
Negative
publicity and uncertainty related to re-organizations in 2 of SMART's SAS
SSD competitors (STEC and OCZ) combined with growing market appreciation of
the significance of adaptive R/W technology helped to create a more
favorable search climate for SMART in this quarter.
And SMART's MLC
based SAS SSDs performed mostly well when compared to (older) and more
expensive SLC SAS SSDs from SanDisk, HGST and Toshiba in a review by
StorageReview.com |
|
| 11 |
RunCore |
industrial SSDs
PCIe SSDs |
Up 6 places since the last quarter. |
|
| 12 |
Nimbus |
rackmount SSDs
HA SSDs |
Up 6 places since the last quarter. |
|
| 13 |
SanDisk |
PCIe SSDs
SSD software
SAS SSDs |
Down 3 places since the last quarter.
The
company declined to reveal the exact size of their SSD revenue but said that
SSDs were already more than 10% of SanDisk's revenue and they expect to see
strong growth in SSDs.
Extrapolating the clues from the company for
the recent quarter I estimated that SanDisk's SSD revenue run rate was about
$0.5 billion / year. |
|
| 14 |
BiTMICRO |
SSD controllers
PCIe SSDs |
Down 2 places since the last quarter.
Recently BiTMICRO
has confirmed that it had changed its business strategy from being (mainly) a
supplier of rugged embedded SSDs for the industrial and military markets - to
becoming a supplier of fast SSD controllers and fast SSDs aimed primarily at the
enterprise SSD market. |
|
| 15 |
Micron |
consumer SSDs
PCIe SSDs
2.5" PCIe SSDs |
Down 1 place since the last quarter.
Overriding
all previous faltering (and sometimes misdirected) steps taken by Micron in the
SSD market in recent years - the company's 2 biggest legacy achievements in the
SSD market upto now were clearly revealed in 2012.
- revealing that 1/3 of Micron's nand flash trade sales go into SSDs.
|
|
| 16 |
Samsung |
consumer SSDs |
Up 8 places since the last quarter. |
|
| 17 |
Kaminario |
HA SSDs
RAM SSDs |
Up 4 places since the last quarter. |
|
| 18 |
Intel |
PCIe SSDs
consumer SSDs |
Up 2 places since the last quarter.
Does it matter that
Intel, while being a world leading semiconductor company, lacks true grit -
in the SSD sense?
That assessment coming through clearly too in
millions of SSD reader searches is why Intel has been in the lower half of
the top 20 SSD companies lists in the past few years.
Intel has
improved its enterprise SSDs from being naiively designed and potentially
unreliable to adequately me-too.
Why didn't Intel put more resources
into SSD? And why were its flash SSD offerings - for many few years - so
insipid and flaky?
The effect on Intel's thinking of the market distorting lens factor
of - "SSDs are similar to..." are analyzed in the (February 2013)
article - Can
you trust SSD market data?
But another new reason for SSD users to
reconsider Intel's enterprise SSDs - may be software. The capabilities of the
company's new cache accelerator software and its market impact were explored in
an interview (February 2013). Click on
Intel's profile page or
the SSD auto caching news
page for more details. |
|
| 19 (tied)..... |
WD |
industrial SSDs |
Up 4 places since the last quarter. |
|
| 19 (tied) |
Pure Storage |
fast enough rackmount SSDs |
First appearance in the Top 25 SSD companies
list. (Up 7 places - from just outside the list.) |
|
| 21 |
EMC |
rackmount SSDs
SSD software |
Down 2 places since the last quarter. |
|
| 22 |
DensBits |
adaptive R/W DSP
IP
SSD controllers |
Down 7 places since the last quarter.
From
external appearances it seems almost as if the company has gone back into
stealth mode.
The real issue is probably too few people in the company
being stretched by the demands of a small number of strategic business
inquiries which doesn't leave bandwidth for reaching out to the wider market.
These
"quiet" signs are also typical in the lead up to
acquisition
announcements. |
|
| 23 |
Seagate |
PCIe SSDs
hybrid drives |
Down 2 places since the last quarter.
In
this quarter it still looked as if Seagate didn't still take the SSD market
seriously. On the other hand - the SSD market doesn't take Seagate's own SSD
efforts very seriously either.
The tactical solution - as we learned
soon after the quarter ended - was that Seagate would plug its gaps in credible
fast enterprise SSDs by investing in and oeming products designed by
Virident. |
|
| 24 |
Kove |
RAM SSDs |
Down 11 places since the last quarter. |
|
| 25 |
KingFast |
consumer SSDs |
Same as before. |
|
Who's at the next level down?
There
are about 400 SSD companies I know of with visibility below the level of the
companies named above.
Does it matter?
For some it doesn't.
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The SSD market is so large now that some of
the niches within it are bigger than the whole market was 5 years ago. For
companies who simply aspire to be good profitable businesses with revenues in
the tens of millions of dollars range (or multiples of that) - they can probably
get hold of a leading position in their niche and not worry too much about
what's happening to other companies in the wider SSD market. And as SSDs get
more focused and application specific - that's a viable strategy. They still
need our readers - because our readers make the market. But they don't need to
engage with so many of them.
For other companies it does matter.
Every
week I talk to people in SSD companies who say their company aspires to be a
world leader and one of the top SSD companies.
Can they tell me why
anyone should be interested in their products? or doing business with them?
Can
they tell me what they do that's different and better compared to hundreds of
other SSD companies?
Can they tell me what efforts they've made to
invest in communicating their business propositions to the outside world? -
apart from talking to their employees and some legacy distributors, chatting to
some guys they spoke to at a trade show - and writing a meaningless press
release?
Often the answer is to these questions is no. But it
doesn't stop these wannbe the next big SSD companies being greatly surprised
to hear from me that there's more to becoming a leading SSD company than
putting the bits together.
Doesn't the fact they are already so well
known for their other past products (which aren't SSDs - but which do use
chips) will guarantee they have a good starting point?
Maybe - I say -
if they went back in time 5 or 10 years and launched the same product back then
- they wouldn't need these other skills and they could still be successful.
Despite
my doubts - it's possible that even without having any marketing skills
whatsoever - they will be lucky enough to find a lot of customers who know even
less than they do about SSDs - to whom they can sell something.
For
more on this theme take a look at earlier editions in
this series.
The
sample size in Q4 2012 included over 200,000 unique SSD readers on
StorageSearch.com and the rankings were moderated by sanity check referral
data from thousands of external web sites which linked here in that period.
suggested
reading
the
big market impact of SSD dark matter
the Survivor's
Guide to Enterprise SSDs
enterprise SSDs -
exploring the limits of the market in your head |
..... |
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