Record WW Storage Software Sales in 4Q11, and Up 12% for 2011

Results from the International Data Corporation Worldwide Storage Software QView show the worldwide storage software market closed 2011 with record sales.

Revenue during the calendar 4Q11 increased 10.5% year over year to almost $3.8 billion. This made 4Q11 the largest quarter on record and helped to push the full year revenue total up 11.6% over 2010 to a record high of $14.16 billion.

EMC, IBM, and Symantec were the top ranking storage software suppliers with 25.7%, 19.8%, and 15.4% market shares, respectively.

Four out of the seven functional markets tracked by the IDC Storage Software Tracker grew at a double-digit pace in 2011 and continue to exhibit strong growth potential going forward. Storage & Device Management as well as Data Protection & Recovery helped to propel the market into record territory as the two functional markets increased 17.3% and 13.8% respectively during the quarter.

"Despite being a mature market, Data Protection & Recovery sales benefited greatly by the challenges introduced by virtualization and the requirement to guarantee high standards of recovery point objective (RPO) and RTO within these environments," said Eric Sheppard, research director, Storage Software at IDC.

Though smaller in size, the Archiving software market was also a high growth market with revenue up 12% during the calendar year and 7.3% year over year in 4Q11.

"Growth in the archiving segment continues to be fuelled by the adoption of cloud-based archiving solutions and growth in unstructured file data in both physical and cloud infrastructure," said Marshall Amaldas, senior research analyst, Storage Software.

There were also some large, high profile acquisitions in 2011 that directly impacted Archiving software market share. Autonomy’s acquisition of Iron Mountain was followed by HP’s acquisition of Autonomy, which catapulted HP into the number 2 market share position behind IBM.

The fourth quarter also marked the launch of IDC’s new Worldwide Storage Software QView Smart Bundles, which help to size the storage software market in five new ways: pricing method (e.g., capacity based pricing vs. enclosure-based pricing), Channel Method (i.e., direct vs. indirect sales), Deployment Type (i.e., SaaS vs. on prem.), size of company purchasing the software, and disk storage system hardware class (e.g., class of array being protected by the data protection & recovery software). These five new market views are expected to provide industry stakeholders with the ability to respond quickly and effectively to today’s dynamic storage software market through increased insight into today’s rapidly shifting buying behaviors.

IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software QView is a quantitative tool for analyzing the global storage software market. This Tracker counts new license and maintenance revenues quarterly and provides data segmentations by vendor, submarket, functional product family, and region.