STAMFORD, USA: Worldwide storage management software (SMS) market revenue totaled $10.6 billion in 2007, a 12.2 percent increase from 2006 revenue of $ 9.4 billion, according to Gartner Inc.

The market was primarily driven by strong growth in backup/recovery and data replication software. Backup and recovery software grew 11.4 percent in 2007, reaching $2.6 billion, up from $2.3 billion in 2006.

"As companies continue to be pressured by the move to virtualization and the need to make data more easily recoverable and accessible, they have increased spending for updated backup/recovery and data replication software to help with this transition," said Alan Dayley, research director at Gartner.

"Organizations are mainly adding application-specific management options, as well as functionality, that improve protection for remote-office data. 'Rearchitecting' of the enterprise backup infrastructure is another primary purchasing trigger for large organizations looking to improve their recovery capabilities."

In 2007, the top five vendors held more than 74 percent of the overall SMS market and are slowly eroding market shares from the smaller vendors, primarily through acquisitions and expansion of their offerings into emerging SMS technologies, such as archiving, deduplication and virtualization.

EMC maintained its leading position and accounted for 26.5 percent of the total software revenue (see Table 1). Among the top five vendors, NetApp exhibited the strongest growth with a 35.5 percent increase from 2006. IBM also exhibited strong growth with 29.3 percent year-over-year.