With Covid-19, the external storage market plunges in EMEA

The impact of the Covid-19 crisis was largely felt on sales of enterprise-class external storage equipment in EMEA in the first quarter. Between January and March, the market recorded a drop in value of 8.1% compared to the same period last year. This slowdown is due in particular to the 16.5% drop in spending in Western Europe. In comparison, investments grew by 9% in the Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa zone. Analyst at the IDC firm which publishes these figures, Silvia Cosso expects that “the market decline will continue for the rest of the year. The Covid-19 crisis will be remembered as a tipping point that accelerated the transition to the public cloud and consumption-to-use for on-premise equipment. It will also have attracted more investments towards digital transformation ”.

+ 4% for flash storage arrays

Despite the context of an overall decline in the external storage market in EMEA, the all-flash external storage array segment once again performed well. Sales of this type of solution recorded a quarterly increase of 4% (-1.6% in Western Europe). They thus represented 47% (49% in Western Europe) of the total sales of external storage systems made between January and March. Their rise has come at the expense of sales of traditional storage systems and hybrid storage systems. The former saw their sales in value fall by 25% to represent 36% of the market. Sales of the second fell 11%.