Organizations are snapping up software to handle their stored data, according to an IDC report released this week that shows more than US$1.5 billion was spent on storage software worldwide in the second quarter, up 7.3 per cent from the previous quarter.
The storage replication segment led the sales growth with revenue up 8.5 per cent from the first quarter. Software for backing up and archiving data, the largest part of the market, kept pace with the overall market’s growth with a 7.3 per cent gain. Renewed concern by customers about data protection and disaster recovery, plus recently introduced regulations about record retention and retrieval, helped to drive sales in these two segments, according to an IDC statement. Revenue from sales of storage resource management software grew only 6.1 per cent from quarter to quarter.
The top five storage software vendors have remained the same since the last quarter of 2002. In the second quarter, EMC Corp. consolidated its lead as its share of revenue gained about 1.5 percentage points in the quarter to 24 per cent, according to IDC. EMC’s storage software revenue grew 13.6 per cent from the first quarter, to US$399 million from US$351 million. Veritas Software Corp. slightly outperformed the market but trailed EMC with 21 per cent of the market, unchanged from the previous quarter. Computer Associates International Inc., IBM Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. rounded out the top five vendors.
Other vendors together had 29 per cent of the market with US$458 million in revenue, a gain of just 2.2 per cent from the previous quarter’s revenue.
