The storage market is an intensely competitive environment that rewards those most capable of adapting to changes in customer behavior and buying patterns. It is therefore critical that storage manufacturers, channel partners, component suppliers, and other stakeholders in the market have access to the information needed to recognize market changes in a timely manner. Such data is available in IDC's European Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, which provides detailed and unique insight into customer trends at a country-specific and product level. Over the years IDC has become well known for its reliable and timely market data. It is no surprise, therefore, that so many stakeholders in this market rely on IDC's quarterly data to ensure that they can quickly identify pertinent trends in the Western European disk storage systems market.

This service covers the following Western European markets:

• Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom

Each quarter, this service will address the following topics:

• Revenue, units, and new capacity shipments
• ASPs, $/GB, and GB/unit
• RAID versus JBOD
• Installation environments (SAN/NAS/DAS)
• Internal versus external storage
• SAN-attachment by protocol (Fibre Channel, iSCSI, FICON/ESCON)
• Operating systems
• Storage system price bands

This service addresses the following issues that are critical to your success:

• How are ASVs for disk storage systems changing from quarter to quarter?
• Which product lines are capturing end-user mindshare and spending?
• What is the adoption rate for network attached storage (NAS) and storage area networks (SANs)?
• At what rate are new SAN protocols such as iSCSI being adopted?
• How are your company's sales faring against the competition?
• Which regional markets are expanding, and which are contracting?

IDC's European Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker service delivers key data points, including revenue, terabytes, units, and rankings for the following companies: Dell, EMC, Fujitsu Siemens, HDS, HP, IBM, NetApp, and Sun Microsystems.

Quarterly data files are delivered 10 weeks after the end of each calendar quarter. With the purchase of the European Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, you will receive detailed insight, training, and inquiry time for supporting questions regarding data use.

The data in this service is provided in Excel pivot tables. The ability to write and run these tables is provided as a standard feature of Microsoft's application. We attach a database to the Excel workbook, and clients are presented with a row of units and revenue by quarter, and a number of buttons. By clicking to the right of each button, clients can retrieve data associated with the selected item. Tables can also be customized easily by clients with Excel macros to automate quarterly business planning models.

As a privately held company, IDC believes that our customers are our primary constituency. A large percentage of every revenue dollar is reinvested back into our products, including more analysts, more geographic coverage, and extensive primary research.

Our steady growth over the past 10-plus years reflects our commitment to investing in our customers.