Which company sells the most enterprise storage? The answer is almost certainly Amazon AWS, with Microsoft Azure close behind. Although Dell Technologies remains the leader in on-premises storage array sales, the leading enterprise cloud providers have rapidly gained sales in the enterprise. What does this mean for enterprise IT vendors and buyers, and what does this say about our understanding of the market?
The recent IT Brand Pulse report includes an estimate of Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure storage revenue. Although these numbers aren’t broken out, they based this on an assumption of 15% or 20% of total revenue. Given these numbers, it is likely that Amazon AWS has easily passed Dell Technologies as the largest vendor of enterprise storage, with Microsoft Azure in number 3 and NetApp well behind in number 4.
Although these numbers are just estimates, Amazon and Microsoft are making a ton of money on enterprise storage. But the fact that our estimates of the size of the enterprise storage market do not include these numbers tells another story. After all, although revenue from traditional vendors has declined somewhat, the decline does not match the growth of Amazon and Microsoft. This shows that the total market is under-represented in our assumptions. It is likely that these cloud providers are actually expanding the size of the enterprise storage market, not just “stealing sales” from the incumbents.
