Fightin' words
(COMTEX) B: EMC Claims to Have Overtaken Network Appliance in NAS Sales
Invalid DateTime. (ComputerWire via COMTEX) -- EMC Corp has claimed that it has
overtaken Network Appliance Inc as the biggest supplier of NAS storage, based on
the inferred NAS revenues at its rival. In a statement issued yesterday,
Hopkinton,Massachusetts-based EMC said it is basing its claims on the reported
revenues from the two companies.
Unsurprisingly, Network Appliance rejected the claim, and said that EMC has
counted SAN sales as NAS sales, and is guilty of making "rolling market share"
definitions.
"EMC is now the world's number one NAS supplier," said EMC's senior vice
president of marketing David Donatelli. EMC's NAS revenues were $562m during the
first half of 2001, the company said, although that figure was not published
with the company's earning reports.
Network Appliance saw revenue of $225.8m in its fourth fiscal quarter ended
April 30 2001. For its first fiscal quarter, which ended last week, the
company's guidance was for flat revenue. Sunnyvale, California-based Network
Appliance said that during that quarter, 16% of revenue was due to sales of
caching hardware. Taking 84% of the fourth quarter's revenue, and doubling for
the first quarter gives a total of around $379m - or around $180m less than
EMC's.
"EMC will do just about anything to make a claim that they are number one in
every sector," a spokesperson for Network Appliance said. Referring to EMC's
Celerra NAS filers, he said: "EMC ships Symmetrix to make the Celerra work. When
your're talking about pure NAS revenues, I don't think those sales should be in
there. People in this industry know that EMC double counts its shipments," he
said.
EMC freely admitted that it counts some Symmetrix sales as NAS sales. A
spokesperson said its NAS configurations comprise either a Celerra file server
with a Symmetrix array, or Chameleon file server with a Clarion array.
EMC's press release included figures taken from researcher Gartner Dataquest's
forthcoming report on year 2000 market shares, expected to be released in the
next few weeks. Report Author Roger Cox commented: "The market is getting very
competitive. All the vendors are trying to claim they're number one in
something." |
