There’s a report over at iTWire that has two highly pertinent details. (iTWire – Aussie storage growth above average: Gartner.)
The article is about how Australian spending on storage is growing faster than the rest of the world (IMHO that’s just further proof of how helpful the government stimulus package was), and has two particular points of interest.
First:
The big winner was EMC, which saw its revenue from the region grow from $US533.9 million to $US716.0 million. Most other vendors also saw improved revenues…
That doesn’t surprise me. As an employee of an EMC partner, I know EMC have been very strongly pushing in the Australian market over the last 12 months. I fully believe that other vendors have been pushing hard and (for the most part) achieving good results, but EMC has had a really solid story during this spending cycle, and it’s been paying off – time and time again.
What really didn’t surprise me though was the “but” following that above quote:
…but the biggest loser was Oracle. In 2009, Sun had $US134.4 million revenue in 2009. Now part of Oracle, it only recorded $US82.1 million revenue in 2010
Since the Oracle acquisition of Sun, every single one of my customers who had previously been a large Sun customer has either been resolutely turning away from the vendor, or eyeing them with firm displeasure. Why? Oracle’s higher prices for maintenance and product has had a significant impact on the budgetary options available to one of Sun’s biggest previous customer bases – the educational market. (This, for what it’s worth, is why I penned the article last year, “RIP Solaris“.)
While I’m not normally one to put much stock in analyst reports, this one seems to gel with what I’ve been seeing for the past 12 months.