Storage Software Market Sees Double-Digit Growth

The market research firm compared figures from the previous year's first quarter. The overall market grew 14.9 percent to $2.1 billion, year over year.

"Continued customer spending on software for data protection, storage resource management, and compliance, has helped to drive this positive start to 2005," said Rhoda Phillips, IDC's research manager for Storage Software, in a statement. "Spending growth related to data protection, including replication, backup, and archive software, is an indicator of customers' continued concerns about application availability, data management, and business continuity."

EMC continued as the market share leader in the revenue category with a 30.0 percent piece of the market with $625 million in sales while Veritas' 21.4 percent market share of $445 million was good for the second place position. Veritas grew 11.4 percent year over year.

Network Appliance finished in fourth place in the category with $139 million in revenues while IBM was in third place, logging $178 million on 4.8 percent revenue growth. IBM has 8.6 percent market share of the category, IDC said.

In fifth place, but still ahead of a group of smaller firms offering storage software, was Hewlett-Packard, which recorded a 6.6 percent share of market while logging $137 million in sales for the quarter.