Storage s/w market crosses $3bn in Q2: IDC

FRAMINGHAM, USA: According to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, the worldwide storage software market experienced its 19th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth in the second quarter of 2008 (2Q08) with revenues of $3.1 billion, a 14.2 percent increase over the same quarter one year ago. This was the first time that the worldwide storage software market surpassed $3 billion in revenues in a single quarter.

"The overall storage software market grew at a faster rate in the second quarter than in the usually slow first quarter of the year. The year-over-year growth for 2Q08 was 14.2 percent compared to 9.4 percent for 1Q08. Most of the top vendors experienced accelerated growth in the second quarter, which helps to explain the strong Q2 results," said Michael Margossian, research analyst, Storage Software at IDC. "The smaller vendors also had a strong quarter, but had less impact on the overall market than the top vendors."

"The storage software market continued to enjoy strong growth as perceptive users have put more applications and more data under storage software control. Vendors are responding to business-level needs with improved resource utilization, stronger data protection and recovery profiles, finer granularity of storage management, and by meeting more stringent auditing and regulatory realities. The time to value of storage software projects has never been quicker nor needed more," added James Baker, research manager, Storage Software at IDC.

EMC led the overall market with 24.2 percent revenue share in the second quarter of 2008. Symantec took the second position with 19.1 percent revenue share, while IBM finished in the third position with 13.3 percent revenue share. NetApp finished in the fourth position with 7.8 percent revenue share, while HP and CA rounded out the top 5 in a statistical tie with 4.8 percent and 4.4 percent revenue share, respectively.

File system, archiving, and data protection and recovery software were the top three performing markets in the second quarter of 2008, with strong growth in each of these markets driven by the top vendors. Data protection and recovery continues to be the largest market in terms of revenue due to ever-increasing regulations and demand for the ability to safeguard data.

Top 5 Vendors, Worldwide Storage Software Revenue, Second Quarter of 2008 (Revenues are in Millions)



Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, September 2008

Notes: Starting in Q2 2007, IBM is reported as the combined entity of IBM and Softek.