Storage software sees continued growth

Worldwide revenue from storage software reached $2.1 billion in the first quarter of 2005, about 15 percent more than a year ago, according to an IDC report published Monday.

The gain marked the sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth. Market leader EMC improved its market share to 30 percent, IDC said, with revenue rising 17.9 percent to $625 million. EMC has also seen gains in the storage hardware sector this year.

"Continued customer spending on software for data protection, storage resource management and compliance has helped to drive this positive start to 2005," Rhoda Phillips, IDC's research manager for storage software, said in a statement.

Veritas Software maintained its second-place position with 21.4 percent market share, but its year-over-year growth, at 11.4 percent, was less than the industry average of 14.9 percent. Network Appliance was the only other vendor besides EMC that saw a growth rate higher than the industry average. Network Appliance posted a gain of 61 percent in revenue, and climbed two percentage points in market share to 6.7 percent from 4.8 percent in the first quarter of 2004.

IBM and Hewlett-Packard, with 8.6 percent and 6.6 percent market share, retained their positions in the top five, but their performance in the first quarter was sluggish compared with others in the league.

The storage resource management and backup and archive software segments each accounted for a third of the storage software market. The file systems software market grew 25.4 percent in the first quarter, while a year-over-year growth of 19.7 percent was reserved for the storage replication software market.