Despite the ever-escalating amounts of digital data that needs to be stored -- growing at least 60 percent per year -- the storage market has suffered along with the rest of the IT industry in this down economy. What should come as no surprise is that according to the latest numbers from IDC, storage software has outperformed storage hardware.
The research company reports that the worldwide storage software market experienced another decline in year-over-year growth in the third quarter of 2009 (3Q09) with revenues of $2.87 billion, down 7.9 percent from 3Q08, and up a modest 1.2 percent from 2Q09. In contrast, the external disk storage market dropped 10 percent year over year to $4.4 billion, which at least was much better than the 18.5 percent decline experienced in 2Q09.
The storage software market was barely able to maintain a positive sequential growth rate in the third quarter of 2009, said Michael Margossian, research analyst, Storage Software in a release from IDC.
Only two of the top five vendors reported growth: market leader EMC -- 23.4 percent market share -- grew 5.7 percent from Q209, although it dropped 11.1 percent year over year; and third-place IBM (12.2 percent), turned in the best performance, up 6.9 percent sequentially, but down 12.5 percent year over year. Second-place Symantec fell 2.1 percent sequentially and 6.1 percent year over year, followed by fourth-place NetApp (8.9 and 15.7 percent) and CA (3 and 9.7 percent) respectively.
EMC did regain top spot in the replication market with 10.7 percent growth year over year, while NetApp had a corresponding drop -- 10.1 percent. Margossian said NetApp made a big push for their fiscal year end last quarter, which pushed them into the lead for the first time, but they're now back to second place with 29.5 percent market share, with EMC at 32.5 percent share.
Market leader Symantec was the only one of the top three vendors in the data protection and recovery market to suffer a decline (down 1.2 percent to 31.1 percent), while both IBM (14.1 percent) and EMC (12.8 percent) grew sequentially.
Overall, EMC led the Q309 software storage market with 23.4 percent revenue share, followed by Symantec (17.8 percent), while IBM finished in the third position with 12.2 percent. NetApp finished in the fourth position with 7.6 percent, almost double that of fifth-place CA with 3.9 percent.
