IDC Identifies Top Storage Vendors, Market Contracts By 4.7%

By David Roe | Published Mar 8, 2010

Despite persistent global economic difficulties, a recent survey from technology consultancy IDC (news, site) shows that the world-wide storage software market continues to hold its own with 6.3% growth between Q3 and Q4 last year.

However, while the combined market for all top vendors increased by 0.5% in Q4 last year compared with Q4 in 2008, the overall picture is gloomier with a total contraction of the market year-on-year of 4.7%.

According to IDC, data recovery and protection remained the biggest area of growth with EMC (news, site) coming off best with a 23.7% share of the market. IDC_Storage_full year_2010.jpg

Apart from EMC, Symantec (news, site) stayed in second position with 17.5% revenue share, while IBM (news, site) finished in third position with 13.2%. NetApp (news, site) also did well last year finishing in fourth position with 7.9% while HP (news, site) and CA (news, site) rounded out the top 5 with 3.9% and 3.8% revenue respectively.

IDC estimates the total value of the software storage market in the last quarter of 2009 at US$ 3.09 billion, representing a small annual increase on the same quarter in 2008.

Demand For Storage Efficiency

Overall, IBM has had the strongest year-on-year growth in this segment with revenues up 19.3% on Q4 of the previous year, while EMC showed the strongest growth with a 13.1% growth between Q3 and Q4.

…a sign that bodes well for the segment is that as storage consumes larger portions of IT budgets, driven by the exponential growth of data the need for storage management and efficiency increases. Into 2010, storage capital investments are aimed at making more efficient and reliable use of data, data storage, and data management resources,” said Laura DuBois, research director at IDC for Storage Software.

The storage software market consists of eight functional markets: data protection and recovery, archiving (including email archiving), storage replication, storage management, storage device management, storage infrastructure, file system and "other".

The figures are compiled using IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker — a quantitative tool for analyzing the global storage software market.

The Tracker counts new license and maintenance revenues quarterly and provides data segmentations by vendor, submarket, functional product family and region.