Storage software market grows by 10 percent

The worldwide storage software market grew 10 percent year-on-year to US$2.1 billion in the third quarter of 2005, making eight consecutive quarters of double-digit year-on-year growth, research company IDC said Monday.

Storage replication made the largest gain with 16.8 percent year-on-year growth, while the back-up and archiving markets increased by 12.7 percent.

This growth was due to the increasing demand for information protection, recovery, and retrieval, the greater prevalence of remote working, and the need for compliance to regulations, IDC said.

"We see strong demand in the backup, archive and replication segments driven by fundamental user requirements to protect, recover, and retrieve information, not only in the data centre but also in remote and branch office locations," Laura DuBois, research director for storage software at IDC, said in a statement.

"This demand is in response to drivers such as application availability and business continuance, disaster recovery, and regulatory compliance," DuBois said.

EMC led the overall market in the third quarter with US$621 million in revenue, and a 29.1 percent revenue share. Symantec, which has recently acquired Veritas, took second position with $427 million in revenue, and a 20 percent revenue share.

IBM finished in third position with US$201 million and a 9.4 percent revenue share, "posting a strong result of 12.5 percent year-on-year growth," said IDC.

Network Appliance and Hewlett-Packard were tied at 6.9 percent and 6.7 percent revenue share respectively. Among the top five vendors, Network Appliance had the strongest year-on-year growth at 42.5 percent.

Tom Espiner of ZDNet UK reported from London.