Storage software market grows without EMC
IDC reports Q2 storage software revenue grew 8.6 percent overall but dropped at EMC and Symantec
Follow @infoworldEMC and Symantec missed out on a boom in storage software sales in the second quarter, according to research by IDC.
While the worldwide market for storage software grew 8.6 percent from a year earlier, to $2.5 billion, revenue from storage software dropped 3.2 percent at EMC and slipped 1.8 percent at Symantec.
EMC remained the market leader, with storage software sales of $654 million and a 26.4 percent share of the market, but its share fell from 29.6 percent in the second quarter of 2005. EMC's share has been sliding since 2004, according to previous IDC figures.
Symantec, in second place, saw sales drop to $468 million and its share of the market slide to 18.9 percent from 20.9 percent a year earlier, according to IDC. Symantec acquired storage software specialist Veritas Software in July 2005: IDC compared Symantec's latest storage software revenue with combined figures for the two companies before the merger.
Storage software sales at IBM grew 34.9 percent year on year to $311 million, taking its share of the market to 12.5 percent, from 10.1 percent a year earlier.
Network Appliance, in fourth place, grew even faster: its revenue from storage software jumped 57.5 percent to $222 million, giving it 9 percent of the market, up from 6.2 percent. This allowed it to overtake Hewlett-Packard, where storage software revenue slipped 2.7 percent and market share dropped to 5.7 percent from 6.3 percent a year earlier, IDC said.
This is the 11th consecutive quarter of growth in storage software sales, IDC said. It attributed much of the growth to demand for storage replication systems, where sales grew 13.2 percent year on year, as companies make good on their disaster recovery and business continuity planning. Demand from archive and hierarchical storage management software (HSM) grew 32 percent, but from a much smaller base.
IDC breaks the storage software market down into eight categories: as data protection and recovery; archive and hierarchical storage management (HSM); storage replication; storage management; storage device management; storage infrastructure; file system, and other storage software.
(IDC is owned by International Data Group Inc., which also owns IDG News Service.)
