IDC’s latest quarterly report on the global external disk storage systems pie chart reveals that the market leader is firmly holding on to its spot, while Hewlett-Packard has created itself an opportunity that may move it up the ladder in the near future.

EMC is number one with the highest market factory systems revenue for an individual vendor in Q3 2011, at 28.6 percent, or $1.6 billion. IBM is next with 12.7 percent,  followed by NetApp with a 12.1 percent stake, the equivalent of $700 million. The latter has been slipping a bit this year.

Hewlett-Packard holds on to the fourth spot with 11.3, a slight improvement that has the potential to grow this momentum under its new leadership according to Chris Mellor.

“If these trends continue – which is a big “if” – then HP will overtake NetApp, possibly next quarter but most likely the one after that. NetApp fingered nine major accounts as the main cause of its recent quarter’s poor results and it will be pumped up to reverse that trend.”

HP’s ranks higher in the total disk systems market, which includes sales of direct-attached storage (DAS) solutions. EMC is still in the lead with a 21.7 percent market share, followed by HP with its 18.9 percent and $1.4 billion in revenue. Dell, Hitachi and IBM have lost some ground when not calculating in DAS, but have seen some growth for the most part in the IDC’s overall scope of market.

A recent update by HP will likely boost its bottom line in future quarters. The company introduced the first solutions based on the in-house StoreOnce deduplication, including new hardware and software. This rounds out the company’s storage portfolio on the backup side; a fast growing industry that’s also very much aligned with the growing amounts of unstructured data.