However, faced with competition from the storage market leader EMC in its core unifiedstorage market, NetApp may find it increasingly hard to gain further market share.
As EMC targets the unifiedstorage market, among the fastest growing segments in the data storage industry, the firm has the opportunity to further expand its leading share in the external data storage market (in GB).
Exponential growth in digital information and greater adoption of newer technologies like cloud computing, big data and virtualization have contributed to growth in external storage systems, and EMC will be the biggest beneficiary with its stronghold in SAN and NAS markets as well as continued growth in unifiedstorage.
While smaller in market share, unified and scale-out storage has been growing at about 15% per year, while block storage lags behind with a 4% growth rate, according to ready.