Global revenue of Top 12 Storage Companies increased 5% from 2012 to 2013, compared to 10% from 2011 to 2012. The worldwide storage market took a pause in 2013 with decline in storage subsystems and software, confirmed IDC.

As written previously, the real winners are not the storage giants but smaller companies and start-ups with more innovative hardware and software.

EMC continues to be #1 in storage. It's the case since 2004 but with a small growth in 2013 (4%), like in 2012. Rival NetApp is also growing slightly, +2% in 2012 and in 2013, compared to 22% in 2011.

WD took the second position from Seagate but this ranking could eventually change in 2014 as Seagate is acquiring $814 million UK firm Xyratex.

In bad shape in storage, IBM, without Tivoli software business, is positioned as #7 in 2013 and was #5 in 2012.

WD records the highest percentage of growth last year with 22% thanks to the acquisition of HGST. 2003 was a remarkable period for SanDisk (+22%) in the growing market of solid-state technology.

In this Top 12 list, firms offering storage and servers were once more the big losers from 2012 to 2013: Dell -13%, IBM -10%, HP -9%, the exception being Hitachi/HDS +3%.

LSI (-5%) will not be probably in the list next year following its acquisition last December by Avago for $6.6 billion, as we are not sure that Avago will publish separately the figures of LSI in the future.

All Top 12 companies record more than $2 billion in revenue but Dell ($1.7 billion)