Dell, HPE take the lead in partner interest for storage

Pure Storage is a strong challenger in the UK

Dell captures the lion's share of partner interest for storage globally and in the UK, according to new research from CRN's parent, The Channel Company (TCC).

HPE generated the second highest level of activity in the market.

Over 1,800 channel partners were examined.

The study looked at those partners who have have the strongest datacentre services and resale capabilities in the US, UK and Germany out of a total data set of around 250,000.

Mindshare

The research looked specifically at mindshare - a metric which measures vendors' search optimisation relevant to specific search categories, in this case storage - as an indicator of interest and engagement.

While the authors specify that mindshare does not equate wallet or market share, the three are closely correlated.

"We have empirical evidence that shows causational relationship between search engine optimisation efforts and sales. So, to put it simply, we found that the more the partner optimises their search engine results for a specific brand of servers, the more servers of that brand they will sell," the authors commented.

The research looked at three key metrics to establish mindshare:

• Storage SEO keyword share (red bars);
• Storage SEO traffic share (blue bars);
• Average number of visitors per partner for the specific vendor (purple line).

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a good indicator of partners' efforts to build top-of-the-funnel leads for a brand, as partners produce content to promote that brand and will want potential customers to find it. The resulting traffic is a measure of the market's reaction to these efforts.

Across all three markets studied - the US, UK and Germany - Dell Technologies and HPE emerged as leaders in mindshare, with Pure Storage, NetApp and IBM rounding out the top five as challengers, although their positions and specific strengths vary across markets.

The UK outlook

The UK sees an overall low level of activity compared to Germany and the US, which may indicate that vendors this side of the channel use different methods of demand generation to their overseas counterparts.

Specifically, the UK features a lot more activity within the channel ecosystem and increased vendor focus on a relatively small number of key partners.

Even in this isolated environment, Dell and HPE dominate. Dell's network is very active, with the highest number of partners generating intent and traffic and the second highest number of average visitors per partner.

HPE, meanwhile, has the highest average number of visitors per partner for storage, which is anomalous and may imply that there is a significantly high interest in HPE storage in the UK market.

Pure Storage is notable for being the only "challenger" vendor whose partners managed to generate any sort of traffic in the UK.

IBM and Lenovo, which make up the rest of the global top five, were not detected at all, pointing to a gap in channel partners' content strategy for these vendors.

Conclusions

Overall, TCC's research determines partners lack vendor-specific content on their websites due to complex content strategy execution.

This raises questions about vendor and market gaps. Vendors should ensure key partners adopt content strategies featuring them.

In storage solutions, only 10-15 per cent of partners consistently create vendor-specific content. However, these numbers vary. An ongoing public cloud study highlights significantly higher engagement. Vendors must encourage partner content strategies for market presence.

The TCC Analytics and Insights team reports on competitive intelligence, distribution and market segmentation among technology vendors and channel partners based on web text and SEO data. For more information contact Andrejs Bogdanovs.