History (1998): Storage Management Software Grew to $2 Billion in 1997

As companies look for more ways to handle storage management internally, the WW storage management software market is reaping the benefits, with revenue in 1997 surpassing $2 billion, an increase of 19% over 1996 results, according to Dataquest’s report Storage Management Software Market Expands Beyond Backup/HSM.

The WW storage management market is forecast to reach $4.8 billion by 2002.

The market is being driven by 3 key segments: core, backup/HSM, and storage resource management (SRM). Core storage management (file systems, volume management, and physical replication) are products that provide basic organization functions and ensure data integrity and availability by offering fast failure recovery and data redundancy. Core product vendor revenue reached $478.4 million in 1997. Backup/HSM products provide backup, restore, archive, and hierarchical storage management (HSM) tools. Backup/HSM products for host, desktop and distributed environments reached $1.33 billion.

SRM products manage properties of physical and logical storage resources such a media health, availability, space loading, performance connectivity, and utilization. SRM products provided $210 million in revenue to vendors in 1997.

“Distributed backup/HSM tools will be the segment of te backup market to be in, with 46% growth in 1997, and a projected 21% CAGR over the next 4 years,” said Carolyn DiCenzo, principal analyst in Dataquest’s network, system, and storage management software WW program.

Computer Associates continued to lead this segment with 29% of the total revenue on all platforms. Seagate Software retained leadership on Windows NT with 42% of that market and Hewlett-Packard won the top spot for Unix-based tools with a 17.5% share.

“The majority of core software revenue is attributable to the mainframe market as users in this space are willing to pay high premiums in order to guarantee constant uptime with no interruptions to data access, regardless of disaster,” added DiCenzo.

IBM led this segment with a 36% share. EMC captured 28% of the market.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 126 on July 1998 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.