EMC Still Tops In Storage Software, But IBM Closes On Symantec For Second Spot: IDC

IDC on Monday reported in its quarterly Worldwide Storage Software QView that revenue for the entire storage software industry in the third quarter reached $3.5 billion, in increase of 9.7 percent over the third quarter of last year.

EMC maintained its position as the top vendor during the quarter with a 10.3-percent year-over-year growth in revenue to $847 million, accounting for about 24.5 percent of the entire market.

EMC was also the largest storage hardware vendor in the third quarter thanks to its 22 percent revenue over last year's sales to reach $1.6 billion, IDC last week reported.

Symantec maintained its number two position in the storage software market with revenue of $530 million. However, because of its relatively anemic year-over-year growth rate of 2.2 percent, Symantec is actually opening the door for IBM, which saw its revenue grow 8.8 percent to $485 million, to overtake it in the near future.

NetApp kept its position as the fourth largest storage software vendor, but with a tiny 0.3-percent year-over-year growth to $304 million. It was followed by Hitachi, which IDC said grew 18.4 percent to reach $140 million.

Hewlett-Packard, which was not in the top five, was nonetheless the fastest-growing vendor with a 38.2-percent growth in revenue thanks to its $2.35 billion acquisition of 3PAR, a developer of enterprise-class storage arrays featuring such software-heavy services such as clustering, tiered storage, and thin provisioning.

Of the seven market segments IDC includes in the storage software market, the largest was data protection and recovery software, which accounted for 34.9 percent of the total market. Archiving software was the fastest-growing market segment with a 12.2-percent year-over-year growth rate, followed by storage and device management software which grew by 11.3 percent, IDC reported.