AsiaPac Excluding Japan Storage Software Market Grew Only 6% in 2012 – IDC

The storage software market in the AsiaPac excluding Japan (APEJ) region is expected to reach $1.7 billion by 2017, with a CAGR of 8.8%.

According to the IDC Corp.‘s AsiaPac Semiannual Storage Software Tracker 2H 2012, the market grew at a slower rate of 6.3% year-on-year to reach $1.1 billion in 2012.

          APEJ Storage Software Market Sizing
                 and ForeCast 2012-2017
                            (in $ million)

 (Source: IDC AsiaPac Semiannual
 Storage Software Tracker 2H 2012)

Notes: The data refers to software license, maintenance, and subscription/other software revenue only.

Virtualization, storage efficiency and consideration of cloud-based IT services are some factors that are fueling the demand for the overall storage software. While data protection and recovery software remained the largest contributor to the storage software market, storage infrastructure software had the highest year-on-year growth.

"As firms continue to move more of their tier one application to a virtualized infrastructure, there is corresponding investments in new data protection, snapshot/replication, and snapshot management solutions to ensure the protection and recovery of images and data," says Ridhi Sawhney, research manager for IDC’s AsiaPac storage software research. "Investments in a range of storage-efficiency technologies are growing as it enables firms to curb storage budgets increases while addressing storage complexity and needs. IDC sees an increase in the usage of backup appliances as the concerns over vendor lock-in seemed to have diminished over time."

Other findings from the research include:

• In 2012, storage software landscape was dominated by big players like EMC, Symantec, IBM, HDS and HP and constituted around 80% of the total market size.
• Amongst the above leading vendors IBM has the highest year-on-year growth, while Symantec and EMC experienced flat growth. HDS and HP had a year-on-year decline.
• Banking, government, and communication and media continue to be the largest spenders of storage software in 2012, as the need to cater to the massive growth of data and usage of storage and optimization technologies increases.
• Australia and PRC were the major economies in terms of the market size contribution, with 29% and 25% share respectively. Growth in emerging economies, like Indonesia, is at a healthy rate and expected to accelerate in the coming years with new projects kicking in.

IDC sees an increased focus by IT organizations on curbing storage budgets, costs, and capacity while optimizing performance and capacity. As a result, there has been increased user interest in, and product support for, automated tiering, deduplication, compression, thin provisioning, and space-efficient snapshots.