Storage Startup popularity on Google Trends

I was just playing around with Google Trends. A great tool to compare search popularity between search terms.

How much impact storage startups really have on the market is hard to pin down, but the search popularity of individual brand names does provide some perspective.

Below, I compared worldwide search popularity between Storage Startups over the last 6 years. I looked at three groups; Boxed Storage, Software-only Storage and Server-side Caching Solutions. Then to put the Startup scene in some perspective I compared the most popular of each group to storage giants EMC and Netapp.

Boxed Storage: Nutanix, Nimble Storage, Pure Storage, Tintri, Skyera


View in Google Trends

Software-only Storage: Nexenta, Atlantis Computing, Maxta


View in Google Trends


Server-side Caching Solutions: PernixData, Infinio, Proximal Data

View in Google Trends


EMC, Netapp vs Startups

How do the startups fare against the big boys? I compared the search volume of EMC and Netapp to startups Nimble Storage, Nexenta and PernixData.


View in Google Trends

The search volume for our most popular storage startups is nearly negligible when compared to the storage giants. For a startup aficionado like myself this is an important observation. Anything you focus on appears bigger and without some outside perspective, can lead to a warped view on the actual situation.

This ties in nicely with what I have heard from many CEOs of storage startups I spoke with; the real competition is not between storage startups but with the industry incumbents like EMC, HP and Netapp.

In my interview with Suresh Vasudevan of Nimble Storage, when asked about his most dominant competitors, he said: ‘The companies that our sales encounter most of all are the large giants, EMC, HP, Dell, Netapp. That just goes to show that no matter how enthousiastic you can get about the startup field in Silicon valley, the vast part of the market is still dominated by the giants. I would say between 85% to 90% of the time. ‘

Google Trends seems to agree with him. Happy easter everyone!