According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker, global market revenue for enterprise external OEM storage systems declined 8.2% year over year to $6.5 billion during Q1/20.

Total external OEM storage capacity shipped was up 3.0% year over year to 17.3 exabytes during the quarter. Revenue generated by the group of original design manufacturers (ODMs) selling directly to hyperscale datacenters grew at 6.9% year over year to $4.9 billion in Q1/20, although capacity shipped decreased by 20.2% year over year to 54.8 exabytes. Total capacity shipments for the market (External OEM + ODM Direct + Server-Based Storage) declined 18.1% to 92.7 exabytes.

“The external OEM market faced stiff headwinds during the first quarter as enterprises across the world had operations impacted by the global pandemic,” said Sebastian Lagana, research manager, Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies at IDC. “ODMs once again generated growth, taking advantage of increasing spend from hyperscalers – demand that we anticipate will remain solid through the first half of 2020 as many enterprises continue to default to remote work, individuals and employees leverage cloud-based collaboration tools, and content delivery networks ensure support for elevated levels of streaming entertainment consumption requirements.”

Dell Technologies was the largest external enterprise storage systems supplier during the quarter, accounting for 33.2% of worldwide revenue. NetApp placed second with a revenue share of 11.0%, followed by HPE/New H3C Group at 9.9%. Hitachi held the fourth position, while IBM, Pure Storage, and Huawei all tied* for the fifth position.