Up and down year for storage software market

Peter Dinham
Sunday, 13 September 2009 14:01

The worldwide storage software market again declined in year-over-year growth in the second quarter of this year with revenues of only $2.8 billion, driving growth rates down by 9.8% over the same quarter one year ago.

Although the storage software market is slowly starting to recover, with positive growth over the first quarter of 2009, IDC analyst, Michael Margossian, says that while only two out of the top five vendors experienced growth over the previous quarter, “the replication market grew five percent compared to 1Q09, led by NetApp, “which has been refocusing its efforts and grew 20% from the previous quarter."

"In the second quarter we generally start to see growth from the first quarter, and this year was no exception," added Margossian’s IDC colleague, Noemi Greyzdorf, who said that the data protection and recovery market had a sequential growth rate of nearly three percent and the top three vendors in the market – Symantec, IBM, and EMC – all had positive growth. “In addition, the device management and archiving software markets each managed positive gains over the first quarter," Greyzdorf said. 

According to IDC, EMC led the overall market with 22.4 percent revenue share in the second quarter of 2009, Symantec held onto the second position with 18.5 percent revenue share, while IBM finished in the third position with 11.5 percent revenue share. IDC also says that NetApp finished in the fourth position with 8.5 percent revenue share while CA rounded out the top five with 4.1 percent revenue share.