Huawei Technologies, a Chinese company best known for its smartphones, telecommunications equipment and networking products, also plans to make a big splash in the enterprise data storage market.
“We don’t want to just be No.1 in China…We want to be at least the top three in the world by 2018,” Fan Ruiqi, president of storage for Huawei, told Reuters. He added that by 2018, he expects Huawei’s storage revenue to reach at least $2 billion.
To achieve that goal, the company is banking on growing demand from its home country and Europe.
Seeking customers for its enterprise storage systems, like the high-end OceanStor 18000 V3 line, Huawei is targeting governments, telecom providers and financial firms. The company beats EMC and IBM on its home turf, but lags globally. In Europe, Fan told the news outfit that Western Europe is a growth driver, with particularly strong demand from Italy and Spain.
Huawei faces some established heavyweights in its climb to the top three of the worldwide storage vendor rankings.
Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC – soon to be acquired by Dell – is the perennial leader in the data storage market. According to the latest figures from International Data Corporation’s (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, EMC currently holds an 18.4 percent share of the market and third-quarter revenues of $1.6 billion followed by HP with 16.3 percent share and $1.4 billion in revenues.
Dell, which is poised to create a mammoth IT company by bringing EMC into the fold, took third place with 9.9 percent of the market. NetApp and IBM were statistically tied for fourth place.
IDC’s data suggests that shake up the storage industry, Huawei will need to look beyond arrays.
Liz Conner, research manager for IDC Storage, observed that the market for enterprise data storage technologies “continued to follow a consistent trend in the third quarter of 2015. Spending on traditional external arrays declined during the quarter as infrastructure refresh, coupled with the demand for software-defined storage and cloud-based storage, drove investments more heavily in server-based storage and hyperscale infrastructure.”
Beyond arrays, in September Huawei released OceanStor DJ (Disc Jockey), a storage management platform that simplifies storage management and deployment operations, shrinking enterprise application deployment times to under 5 minutes, according to the company. “In response to the staggering amounts of data in cloud data centers, OceanStor DJ provides storage as a service (SaaS) for enterprise IT systems, freeing up engineers from heavy workload in managing data storage and making them more focused on service transformation and innovation,” said Fan at the time.