FRAMINGHAM, MA – Vendor revenue in the worldwide enterprise storage systems market decreased 0.6% year-over-year in the first quarter, IDC said.

Total capacity shipments were up 14.1% year over year to 114.2 exabytes during the quarter, even as revenue fell to $13.4 billion during the period.

Revenue generated by ODMs selling directly to hyperscale datacenters declined 5.3% year-over-year to $2.95 billion. This represents 22.1% of total enterprise storage investments during the quarter. Sales of server-based storage decreased 6.6% to just over $3.6 billion in revenue, or 26.6% of total enterprise storage investments. The external storage systems market revenue totaled nearly $6.9 billion during the quarter, up 5.0% from last year.

"First quarter results are an acceleration of the slowdown we noted last quarter, with declining ODM and internal (server-based) storage the primary drivers of market contraction." said Sebastian Lagana, research manager, Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies. "OEM vendors selling dedicated storage arrays still generated growth during the quarter, although slowing flash-centric array growth indicates that the opportunity for existing install-base upgrades is beginning to wane."

Dell was the largest supplier for the quarter, accounting for 22.2% of total worldwide enterprise storage systems revenue and declining 1% from last year. HPE/New H3C Group was the second largest supplier with an 17.3% share of revenue on a year-to-year contraction of 1.6%. NetApp generated a 6.7% share of total revenue, followed by Hitachi at 3.6%. Lenovo, IBM, Pure Storage, Huawei, Fujitsu and Inspur all statistically tied* for the number 5 position with shares of 2.5%, 2.5%, 2.2%, 2.1%,1.9%, and 1.9% respectively.

As a single group, storage systems sales by ODMs directly to hyperscale datacenter customers accounted for 22.1% of global spending during the quarter, down 5.3%.