WW Purpose-Built Backup Appliance Market Grew 7% Y/Y in 1Q15 – IDC

Worldwide purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA) factory revenues grew 6.9% year over year totaling $719.3 million in 1Q15, according to the International Data Corporation‘s Worldwide Quarterly Purpose-Built Backup Appliance Tracker.

Total PBBA open systems factory revenue increased 7.2% year over year in 1Q15 with revenues totaling $651.0 million while the mainframe market experienced a growth of 4.1% for the same period.

Total worldwide PBBA capacity shipped for 1Q15 reached 647PB, an increase of 32.3% year over year.

“The worldwide PBBA market got off to a strong start in 2015 with solid year-over-year revenue growth in the historically slower first quarter,” said Liz Conner, research manager, storage systems. “Vendors continue to focus on enhancing and updating their PBBA product portfolios. The results are more flexible, agile, and now, typically hybrid, products that are helping to meet a wider range of data protection needs for end users.”

Total Worldwide PBBA 1Q15 Results
EMC maintained its lead in the overall PBBA market with 52.4% revenue share in the first quarter, followed by Symantec with 18.5% share. IBM and HP tied* for third, posting 5.2% and 4.5% market share, respectively. Barracuda, Quantum, and Dell finished the quarter in a three-way tie* for the number 5 position with 3.5%, 3.3%, and 2.5% market share, respectively.

Top 5 Vendors, WW PBBA Factory Revenue, First Quarter of 2015
(revenue in $ million)

WW Total PBBA Market, Top 5 Vendors, 1Q14-1Q15
(shares based on revenue)

(Source: IDC Worldwide Purpose Built Backup Appliance Quarterly Tracker, June 18, 2015)

* Note: IDC declares a statistical tie in the worldwide purpose-built backup appliance market when there is less than one% difference in the factory revenue share of two or more vendors.

Taxonomy Notes
IDC defines a purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA) as a standalone disk-based solution that utilizes software, disk arrays, server engine(s), or nodes that are used for a target for backup data and specifically data coming from a backup application (e.g., NetWorker, NetBackup, TSM, and Backup Exec) or can be tightly integrated with the backup software to catalog, index, schedule, and perform data movement. The PBBA products are deployed in standalone configurations or as gateways. PBBA solutions deployed in a gateway configuration connect to and store backup data on general-purpose storage. Here, the gateway device is serving as the component that is purpose built solely for backup and not for supporting any other workload or application. Regardless of packaging (as an appliance or gateway), PBBAs can have multiple interfaces or protocols. Also, PBBAs often can provide and receive replication to or from remote sites and a secondary PBBA for the purpose of DR.