WW Backup Appliance Market Revenue Grew 10% Y/Y in 4Q12, Capacity 43% – IDC

Worldwide purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA) factory revenues posted a 9.7% year-over-year increase, totaling $859.5 million in 4Q12, according to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Purpose-Built Backup Appliance Tracker.

However, the total PBBA open systems market posted just under $567.5 million in revenues, representing 16.4% growth from the prior year’s fourth quarter.

The total worldwide PBBA capacity shipped reach 455,254 terabytes, growing 42.9% year over year.

"The total worldwide PBBA market resumed robust growth in the fourth quarter of 2012. Overall, the worldwide PBBA market experienced strong growth in revenue, capacity, and shipments," said Robert Amatruda, research director, data protection and recovery, IDC. "Long-term, we expect the worldwide PBBA will continue to outpace the overall data protection and recovery software and hardware market as customers continue to embrace turnkey systems to alleviate their backup and recovery challenges."

Total Worldwide PBBA 4Q12 Results
EMC maintained its lead in the overall PBBA market with 66.5% revenue share in the fourth quarter, followed by Symantec and IBM and with 11.8% and 8.4% market share, respectively. Symantec exhibited strong year-over-year growth in the PBBA market in the fourth quarter of 2012 while HP and IBM saw their revenues decline.

                 WW PBBA Factory Revenue, 4Q12
                               (in $ million)

 (Source: IDC Worldwide Purpose Built Backup Appliance
 Quarterly Tracker, March 25, 2013)

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.