Robert Cox

"They have done a good job of selling into the small and medium business market," said Robert Cox, vice president of research for Gartner.

While Apple's 2004 storage sales of US$78 million placed the company number 12 worldwide, last year it more than doubled that revenue to $185 million and leaped into the 10th spot, according to Gartner vice-president of research Robert Cox.He told the Web site Smarthouse: "They have done a good job of selling into the small and medium business market."

The analyst estimated that almost 40% of the Xserve RAID set-ups sold by Apple are hooked to servers running operating systems other than Mac OS X, which puts the company "in a good and growing market; [they] have done a good job of building a reliable and easy-to-use device from commodity components."He also said that, on a gigabyte-per-dollar basis, Apple's Xserve RAID "is the best in the world for Fibre Channel storage, and [it] trumps most SCSI storage solutions as well."

Gartner analyst Robert Cox says Apple's products sell for "a fraction of the cost of storage" from Dell, HP, Sun or IBM, poising Apple for further market share gains this year.

Gartner analyst Robert Cox says Apple's products sell for "a fraction of the cost of storage" from Dell (Research), HP (Research), Sun (Research) or IBM (Research), poising Apple for further market share gains this year.