Worldwide Storage Software Market Sustains Double-Digit Growth in Third Quarter of 2005

IDC: Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, the worldwide storage software market grew 10.0% year over year to $2.1 billion in the third quarter of 2005, marking eight consecutive quarters of double-digit year-over-year growth. In the third quarter of 2005, the storage replication market posted the largest gain at 16.8% year-over-year growth, while the back-up and archive market enjoyed a 12.7% growth rate. The storage resource management and the back-up and archive markets continued to represent the largest storage software markets, each representing a third of the market. The file systems software market once again enjoyed strong results with 15.6% year-over-year growth in the third quarter. We see strong demand in the backup and archive and replication segments driven by fundamental user requirements to protect, recover, and retrieve information, not only in the data center but also in remote and branch office locations. This demand is in response to drivers such as application availability and business continuance, disaster recovery, and regulatory compliance.

EMC led the overall market this quarter with 29.1% revenue share in the third quarter of 2005. Symantec, with its recent of acquisition of VERITAS, took the second position with 20.0% revenue share, while IBM finished in the third position with 9.4% revenue share, posting a strong result of 12.5% year-over-year growth. Network Appliance and HP once again rounded out the top 5 in a statistical tie with 6.9% and 6.7% revenue share, respectively. Among the top 5 vendors, Network Appliance posted the strongest year-over-year growth in the third quarter at 42.5%.

More: Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker Publ 20051212