Storage software revenue stays aloft

Growing demand for more efficient storage helped push second-quarter revenue from storage software to a 16.9 percent rise over last year, according to a new IDC study.

But compared with the last quarter, the growth in worldwide revenue was negligible, the research firm said in the report, released on Monday. As in the first quarter, the sector netted $1.85 billion in the three months to June.

The increase registered by the storage software segment was far more significant than that seen by the hardware sector. According to another recent IDC report, worldwide shipments of external disk storage systems grew only by 8 percent in the second quarter.

The most considerable second-quarter lift was reserved for device and SAN management tools, which saw a revenue increase of 36 percent from a year ago. File system software was up 18.5 percent, while storage replication rose 13.5 percent. Back-up and archive software saw an increase of 9.2 percent.

For the first time, storage resource management emerged as the largest of the storage software markets, as companies saw the need to support larger and more complex storage networks, Bill North, IDC's storage software research director, said in a statement.

EMC and Veritas, which registered 30.5 percent and 23.4 percent year-over-year growth, respectively, held on to the top two positions in the storage software market. EMC, with a 32.5 percent market share, is far ahead of Veritas, which has 22.6 percent, according to the IDC report. Third-place IBM and fourth-place Hewlett-Packard left Computer Associates International in the fifth position.