7th Consecutive Quarter of Growth for Storage Software

The storage software market experienced its seventh consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth during 2Q11, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Storage Software QView.

The total market value approached $3.4 billion during the quarter, up 11.3% over the same period last year. This double-digit growth broadly aligned with increased investments made within the server and disk storage systems markets during the same quarter, an indication that storage software sales benefited from expansive investments made within the infrastructure space.

Five of the seven functional markets covered grew at double-digit or high single-digit rates during the quarter. Storage Infrastructure Software and Storage & Device Management Software experienced the strongest gains with 22.6% and 17.3% year-over-year growth respectively. Data Protection and Recovery Software sales accounted for 34.2% of market value and were the largest contributor to incremental revenue for the quarter compared to one year ago.

EMC, Symantec, and IBM were the top ranking storage software suppliers with 24.5%, 15.8% and 14.1% market shares respectively. All suppliers covered within the Qview experienced year-over-year increases in storage software sales, suggesting demand for storage software was far reaching and went well beyond simple product refresh cycles.

"The far-reaching and double-digit storage software market growth was driven by quite a few factors," said Marshall Amaldas, senior research analyst with IDC’s Storage Software program. "New product introductions, simplified pricing & bundling, ongoing modernization of data protection processes, a need to improve management of storage within virtual environments, and desire to mitigate against legal and IT risks were all important contributors to growth. The fact that all of this is occurring during times of elevated economic uncertainty makes the market growth even more impressive"

WW Storage Software Revenue
(Revenues in $ Millions)
idc_storage_software_2q11
(Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Qview,
September 2011)

Note: IDC declares a statistical tie in the worldwide storage software market when there is less than one percent difference in the revenues of two or more vendors.

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

Comments

The WW storage software market is smaller than the WW hardware storage market. It was always the case. Software represented 31% and disk subsystems - tape subsystems not included - 69% of the global revenues in 2Q11 according to IDC's figures.

Just to give an idea of the trend, these percentages were respectively 23% and 77% for the year 2002.

Software is increasing faster since several years, and even by 11.3% from 2Q10 to 2Q11, compared to 10.2% for hardware.

But sequentially this year, it's another story. From 1Q11 to 2Q11, storage software revenues are down by 3%. In 2009 and 2010, revenues increased 1% between the two three-month periods.

All the biggest companies cited by IDC saw their sales diminishing sequentially but one, NetApp. Note that HP is coming back in the IDC list after being removed from 4Q10 (less than $100 million) to 1Q11. CA also quits the top ranking in 4Q10 and never comes back.