IBM Achieves Fastest Growth Among Top Three External Disk Storage Vendors, According to Leading Research Firm

IBM today announced the fastest external disk storage systems revenue growth in the fourth quarter of 2005 among the top three external disk storage vendors, according to data released by IDC(1). Growing 47 percent worldwide, IBM outpaced both EMC and Hewlett-Packard.

The report also indicates that IBM outgrew EMC and HP for the year, with IBM external disk storage systems achieving 24 percent full year revenue growth as measured by IDC. IBM was also the only one of the three top vendors to increase its revenue share year over year, and saw the largest fourth quarter revenue share increase of any individual vendor reported by IDC.

"There's a sea change occurring in the storage industry, causing customers to increasingly consider and adopt IBM's storage technology as they are faced with escalating requirements to capture and store data," said Andy Monshaw, general manager of IBM Storage. "One key driver is our belief in open systems that free customers from the proprietary lock of a single vendor. IBM's Virtualization Engine offerings, including SAN Volume Controller, are designed to help release customers from vendor lock-in by creating the flexibility to build open storage environments."

IBM achieved strong revenue growth in all regions for the fourth quarter of 2005, with external disk storage revenue growing by more than 40 percent year to year in North America, Western Europe and Asia-Pacific, where it tied for number one in market share, as measured by IDC. IBM also saw an increase of more than 40 percent in the United States, as well as showing worldwide revenue growth in all price bands. This included a 94 percent increase from the fourth quarter of 2004 to the fourth quarter of 2005 in the highest-level price bands(2), representing enterprise-class storage systems.

Driven by compliance regulations and the benefits of Information on Demand, businesses are turning to IBM for their storage needs. Recent IBM customer wins include University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), University of Wyoming, Palm Beach Community College and Schwenk Kement KG. Also in the fourth quarter, IBM announced that its TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller Solution (SVC) and IBM TotalStorage DS8300 both achieved tops scores for performance as measured by the Storage Performance Council's latest benchmark, SPC-2.(3)

About Information on Demand

The desire by businesses to access, manage, deliver, secure and store information more efficiently is driving rapid change in the IT marketplace. Traditional low-tech, hardware-only approaches by proprietary vendors are meeting with resistance as companies grappling with new government mandates and business demands strive to capture and integrate information in a more seamless, real-time fashion across the enterprise. IBM's information on demand approach combines deep business insight with open standards, advanced storage systems, and sophisticated software for information, security and IT system management to create cost effective and flexible information infrastructures. Regardless of industry, IBM helps companies transform data into insight to enable information on demand.

About IBM

IBM is the world's largest information technology company, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. Drawing on resources from across IBM and key IBM Business Partners, IBM offers a wide range of services, solutions and technologies that help enable customers, large and small, to take full advantage of the new era of e-business on demand. For more information about IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com .

(1) Source: IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker Q4 2005.

(2) Price bands above $300,000

(3) Results current as of 12/14/05. Eight IBM TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller V3.1 engines and 24 IBM TotalStorage DS4300s. SPC-2 MBPS(TM): 3,517.75; SPC-2 Price-Performance: $563.93 ASU Capacity: 20,615.843 GB; Data Protection Level: Mirroring; Audit Certification Number: B00001, Availability Date: November 18, 2005. See http://www.storageperformance.org/results for more information.

The IBM TotalStorage DS8300 submitted with 2 clusters each containing 4 Power 5 CPU processors and 32 gigabytes cache for a total of 64 gigabytes cache. SPC-2 MBPS(TM): 3,217.53; SPC-2 Price-Performance: $539.38, ASU Capacity: 6,957.847 GB; Data Protection Level: Mirroring; Audit Certification Number: B00006, Availability Date: available today. See http://www.storageperformance.org/results for more information. IBM, the e-business logo, TotalStorage, SAN Volume Controller and DS8000 are trademarks of IBM Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other company/product names and service marks may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Contact: Mike Darcy IBM Media Relations 914-766-4777 mdarcy@us.ibm.com