WW Storage Software Market Continues to Grow in 3Q10, by 9%

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, the worldwide storage software market experienced continued gains in the third quarter of 2010 (3Q10) with revenues of $3.1 billion, representing 8.7% growth over the same quarter one year ago, and a 6.3% increase from the previous quarter (2Q10).

"The gains in the storage software market in the third quarter were largely the result of overall growth from some of the large suppliers. Among the top five suppliers, EMC and NetApp both showed double digit growth with 13.9% and 19.8% respectively, in year-over-year growth," said Laura DuBois, program vice president, Storage Software at IDC. "From a segment perspective, the strongest growth is coming from double digit spending in three segments of storage software: data protection and recovery (up 10.7% year over year), archiving (up 12%), and storage infrastructure (up 37.3%)."

"Customers continue to re-architect their backup and recovery approaches in light of consolidation, ongoing data growth, and infrastructure changes with all three factors driving continued spending in data protection," added DuBois. "Archiving deployments are fueled by a combination of regulatory, legal, and IT efficiency motivations. Lastly, we are seeing increased spending on the infrastructure side as a result of interest in automated storage tiering."

                        WW Storage Software Revenue, 3Q10
                                    (Revenues in Millions)

(Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, December 2010)

Notes: Starting in Q2 2007, IBM is reported as the combined entity of IBM and Softek.

Taxonomy Note: IDC has updated its storage software taxonomy to reflect changes in the market over the last several years. The storage software taxonomy includes eight functional markets: data protection and recovery, archiving (including email archiving), storage replication, storage management, storage device management, storage infrastructure, file system, and ‘other’.