Healthy Gains For Storage Software Market In Q3

The worldwide storage software market showed another healthy gain in the third quarter of 2010, with 8.7 percent growth over the same period a year ago, researcher IDC has reported.

In its Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, the company said the market brought in revenues of $3.1 billion, which also amounted to a 6.3 percent increase from the second quarter in 2010.

Infrastructure Sees Largest Gains

“From a segment perspective, the strongest growth is coming from double-digit spending in three segments of storage software: data protection and recovery, up 10.7 percent year over year; archiving, up 12 percent; and storage infrastructure, up 37.3 percent,” said Laura DuBois, programme vice president for storage software at IDC

“Archiving deployments are fuelled by a combination of regulatory, legal, and IT efficiency motivations. Lastly, we are seeing increased spending on the infrastructure side as a result of interest in automated storage tiering,” she added.

According to the research, customers are continuing to re-architect their backup and recovery approaches in light of consolidation, ongoing data growth, and infrastructure changes, with all three factors driving continued spending in data protection.

EMC was the leading vendor in the segment, hauling in $768 million and taking 24.4 percent market share. Symantec was second at $518 million (16.5 percent share), followed by IBM ($421 million, 13.4 percent), NetApp ($263 million, 8.4 percent), CA ($104 million, 3.3 percent) and Hewlett-Packard ($99 million, 3.2 percent).

“The gains in the storage software market in the third quarter were largely the result of overall growth from some of the large suppliers. Among the top five suppliers, EMC and NetApp both showed double digit growth with 13.9 percent and 19.8 percent respectively, in year-over-year growth,” said DuBois.