In contrast to the 3.2 percent contraction of the storage market in IDC’s 2009 research, 2010 sales of storage software increased 10.3 percent to $12.7 billion. The storage infrastructure market experienced the highest calendar year growth of 23.6 percent. Data protection and recovery surpassed $4.4 billion for the year, an increase of 11.2 percent.
"The storage software market is in the midst of a sustained recovery, which is partly driven by new product innovations, and partly by a strong desire to address inefficiencies related to storing, protecting, and managing corporate data," said Eric Sheppard, research director with IDC's storage software program in a statement. "A considerable increase in storage software designed to enable automated storage tiering, coupled with a continued market trend of addressing aging, inefficient storage deployments were two important drivers of market growth during the quarter."
Research by IDC shows that the top vendors of storage software by revenue for Q4 2010 were EMC, Symantec, IBM, NetApp and Hitachi.
IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker is a quantitative tool that counts new license and maintenance revenues quarterly and provides data segmentations by vendor, submarket, functional product family and region. IDC’s storage software taxonomy includes data protection and recovery, archiving, storage replication, storage management, storage device management, storage infrastructure, and file system.
Valerie Valentine is senior editor for Information Management. You can follow her on Twitter at @va1va1entine or via email at valerie.valentine@sourcemedia.com.
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