Top 5 storage vendors shows massive shift to the cloud

There’s a changing of the guard afoot in the storage industry, and it’s getting cloudy.

Each quarter 451 Research Group surveys it members in its Voice of the Enterprise series. Late last year, the company’s research revealed a dramatic reshaping of the storage market both in terms of which vendors enterprises consider strategic storage partners and where their future storage will be housed.

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451 Research

451 asked the more than 700 IT decision which vendor they spend the most money with now (this was Q4 of 2015). EMC, NetApp, Dell, HP and IBM were the top five storage vendors for current spending.

When storage experts were asked, “Which vendor will you spend the most with on storage in 2 years?” the answers were markedly different.

EMC is still the top storage vendor, but Amazon jumps from the seventh most strategic vendor to the second. Microsoft creeps into the top 5 too, landing at number three. NetApp drops from second to sixth.

“(This data) emphasizes that not only is cloud storage spending growing, but also that cloud storage providers are increasingly viewed as strategic suppliers as a growing amount of data and applications are moved into these environments,” says the report’s author, Simon Robinson.A majority of storage is still on premises, but that is shifting too. Respondents said about 70% of their storage currently resides in company owned or leased data centers. That is expected to drop to 58% by next year. Meanwhile, respondents said they have about 7.6% of their storage in the cloud now, growing to almost 17% of their storage in the cloud by 2017.

“While the absolute level of cloud-based storage spending may still be in the minority, the direction of travel is clear,” wrote Robinson, a research vice president at 451. “Regardless of company size or vertical, the public cloud is an increasingly standard component of the overall storage infrastructure.”