Infrastructure spending drives storage growth

Organisations have put more money into storage software year-on-year, according to research company IDC.

The world's storage software market had revenues of $3bn (£1.94bn), in the second quarter of 2010, said IDC in a statement on Monday. This represents a global year-on-year revenue growth of 3.3 percent. 

Storage growth was driven by spending on storage infrastructure, archiving, storage management and data protection and recovery. Storage infrastructure saw the most significant growth, up 12.7 percent year-on-year.

The largest vendors of storage software by revenue were EMC, Symantec, IBM, NetApp, CA and Hewlett-Packard. EMC led with quarter two 2010 revenues of $722m, up 13.3 percent on quarter two 2009 revenues of $638m. By contrast, EMC's closest storage competitor Symantec had revenues of $488m.

EMC maintained its grip on the top spot from quarter one 2010, reported better than expected earnings and further staked out a space in the storage infrastructure market, with the release in August of its Unisphere storage management platform for SAN and NAS storage platforms.

"The gains in the storage software market in the second quarter were largely the result of overall growth from some of the large suppliers," said IDC program vice president for storage software Laura DuBois. Two companies — Symantec and Hewlett-Packard — saw their revenues contract, year-on-year. Symantec took a 6.9 percent revenue hit, while HP revenue shrank by 10.3 percent. This contraction helped push HP's storage market share down from 3.8 to 3.3 percent.