Storage Software Market Breaks Records

The global markets continue to prove every quarter that buying more storage software and hardware – whether on-premises or in the cloud – is a never-ending project, thanks to ever-increasing data-creation rates and production workloads in all sectors. The latest market numbers bear this out once again.

Quarterly and yearly results from IDC’s “Worldwide Storage Software QView” show that the worldwide storage software market closed 2011 with record sales for the umpteenth year in succession.

EMC, IBN, Symantec rank highest

Revenue during the calendar 4Q11 increased 10.5 percent year-over-year to almost $3.8 billion (£2.42bn). This made 4Q11 the largest quarter on record and helped to push the full-year revenue total up 11.6 percent over 2010 to a record $14.16 billion.

The usual suspects were all in line at the top of the charts. EMC, IBM and Symantec were the top-ranking storage software suppliers with 25.7 percent, 19.8 percent, and 15.4 percent market shares.

Four out of the seven markets tracked by IDC’s Storage Software Tracker grew at a double-digit pace in 2011 and continue to exhibit strong growth potential. Storage and device management as well as data protection and recovery helped to propel the market into record territory as the two functional markets increased 17.3 percent and 13.8 percent, respectively, during the quarter.

Though smaller in size, the archiving software market was also a high growth market with revenue up 12 percent during the calendar year and 7.3 percent year-over-year in 4Q11.

Acquisitions

There were also some large, high-profile acquisitions in 2011 that directly impacted archiving software market share. For example, Autonomy’s acquisition of Iron Mountain was followed by HP’s acquisition of Autonomy, which catapulted HP into the No. 2 market-share position behind IBM.

IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software QView is a quantitative tool for analysing the global storage software market. This tracker counts new licence and maintenance revenues quarterly and provides data segmentations by vendor, submarket, functional product family and region.