12.12.05

Double Digit Growth In Storage Software

By John Stith

IDG announced in a statement on Monday the worldwide storage software market grew 10% over the year to $2.1 billion dollars in the third quarter of 2005, marking eight consecutive quarters of double-digit growth.

In the third quarter of 2005, the storage replication market posted the largest gain at 16.8% year-over-year growth, while the back-up and archive market enjoyed a 12.7% growth rate. The storage resource management and the back-up and archive markets continued to represent the largest storage software markets, each representing a third of the market. The file systems software market once again enjoyed strong results with 15.6% year-over-year growth in the third quarter.

"We see strong demand in the backup and archive and replication segments driven by fundamental user requirements to protect, recover, and retrieve information, not only in the data center but also in remote and branch office locations," said Laura DuBois, research director for Storage Software at IDC. "This demand is in response to drivers such as application availability and business continuance, disaster recovery, and regulatory compliance."


EMC led the overall market this quarter with 29.1% revenue share in the third quarter of 2005. Symantec, with its recent of acquisition of VERITAS, took the second position with 20.0% revenue share, while IBM finished in the third position with 9.4% revenue share, posting a strong result of 12.5% year-over-year growth. Network Appliance and HP once again rounded out the top 5 in a statistical tie with 6.9% and 6.7% revenue share, respectively.

This industry seems geared to continue the high levels of growth as more and more companies and people switch various forms of online storage through email, records and other items. It stands to reason this area will continue to grow as storage needs get larger and larger.