IDC on Hard Disk Drive market: Transformational Times

One of the problems, as an "industry outsider", of researching the field is lack of access to hard data/research. It's there, it's high-quality and timely. Just expensive and behind pay-walls.

A little information leaks via Press Releases and press articles promoting the research companies.

When one of these professional analyst firms makes a public statement alerting us to a radical restructuring of the industry, that's big news. [Though you'd expect "insiders" to have been aware of this for quite some time.]

What's not spelled out publicly, is How will this impact Enterprise Storage vendors/manufacturers?
There seems an implication that the two major HDD vendors will start to compete 'up' the value-chain with RAID and Enterprise Storage vendors, and across storage segments with Flash memory/SSD vendors.

IDC's Worldwide Hard Disk Drive 2011-2015 Forecast: Transformational Times
 published  in May, 2011. This report consists of Pages: 62 and the price starts from US $ 4500.

Headline: Transformation to just 3 major vendors. (really 2 major + 1 minor @ 10%)

 "The hard disk drive industry has navigated many technology and product transitions over the past 50 years, but not a transformation. [emphasis added]

 The HDD industry is poised to consolidate from five to three HDD vendors by 2012, and
 HDD unit shipment growth over the next five years will slow.

 HDD revenue will grow faster than unit shipments after 2012, in part because HDD vendors will offer higher-performance hybrid HDD solutions that will command a price premium.

 But for the remaining three HDD vendors to achieve faster revenue growth,
 it will be necessary by the middle of the decade for HDD vendors to transform into [bullets added]

•  storage device and
•  storage solution suppliers,
•  with a much broader range of products for a wider variety of markets
•  but at the same time a larger set of competitors."