The storage software market experienced its seventh consecutive
quarter of year-over-year growth during the second quarter of 2011
(2Q11), according to the IT research firm International Data
Corporation (IDC) and the company’s Worldwide Storage Software QView.
The total market value approached $3.4 billion during the quarter, up
11.3 percent over the same period last year. The report noted that this
double-digit growth broadly aligned with increased investments made
within the server and disk storage systems markets during the same
quarter, which the research said was an indication that storage
software sales benefited from “expansive” investments made within the
infrastructure space.
Five of the seven functional markets covered within the Worldwide
Storage Software Qview grew at double-digit or high single-digit rates
during the quarter, with storage infrastructure software and storage
and device management software experiencing the strongest gains with
22.6 percent and 17.3 percent year-over-year growth respectively. Data
protection and recovery software sales accounted for 34.2 percent of
market value and were the largest contributor to incremental revenue
for the quarter compared to one year ago, according to fingures
released by IDC.
Among vendors, EMC, Symantec, and IBM were the top ranking storage
software suppliers with 24.5 percent, 15.8 percent and 14.1 percent
market shares respectively. All suppliers covered within the Qview
experienced year-over-year increases in storage software sales,
suggesting demand for storage software was far reaching and went well
beyond simple product refresh cycles.
EMC posted Q2 revenue of $827 million, up from $722 million in 2010,
while Symantec posted revenues of $533 in Q2 2011. IBM followed with
$477 million in revenue. NetApp placed fourth in market share with 8.9
percent and $298 million in revenue, while Hitachi and HP tied for
fifth place with market share of 4.4 percent and 3.9 percent,
respectively (IDC declares a statistical tie in the worldwide storage
software market when there is less than one percent difference in the
revenues of two or more vendors).
"The far-reaching and double-digit storage software market growth
was driven by quite a few factors," said Marshall Amaldas, senior
research analyst with IDC’s storage software program. "New product
introductions, simplified pricing and bundling, ongoing modernization
of data protection processes, a need to improve management of storage
within virtual environments, and desire to mitigate against legal and
IT risks were all important contributors to growth. The fact that all
of this is occurring during times of elevated economic uncertainty
makes the market growth even more impressive"
IDC also noted it has updated its storage software taxonomy to
reflect changes in the market over the last several years. The storage
software taxonomy now includes seven functional markets: data
protection and recovery, archiving, storage replication, storage and
device management, storage infrastructure, file system, and "other".