Symantec, IBM and EMC continued to hold the lead in worldwide storage software, but the marketwhich closed out the first quarter with revenues of $3.5 billion, up 3.3 percent from the same period last yearshowed signs of slowing, compared with the pace of growth since 2009, according to a report from IT research firm IDC.
EMC placed first with nearly a quarter (24 percent) of revenue share, followed by IBM, with 15.7 percent market share and Symantec rounding out the top three with 14.8 percent share, IDC reported. IBM also posed the second-highest organic growth in the first quarter, jumping 18.4 percent year-over-year. IBM was second only to CommVault, which grew 26.2 percent. Following its acquisition of Autonomy, Hewlett-Packard experienced growth of 72.6 percent year-over year.
“The first quarter saw decidedly mixed results,” Eric Sheppard, research director of storage software at IDC said in a prepared statement. “Incremental spending attributable to recent product refreshes have run their course within some functional markets, such as storage infrastructure software. Meanwhile, continued fine-tuning of product pricing, packaging and messaging is helping to draw out new investments within other markets, such as the data protection and recovery market.”
The two fastest-growing storage software sub-markets were data protection and recovery software and archiving software, which posted year-over-year growth rates of 5.5 percent and 5 percent respectively, for a respective total of $1.25 billion and $411 million in total revenues. As software storage investments slowed among companies with more than 1,000 employees, and those in government and education sectors, IDC noted that small and midsized businesses (SMBs) drove a considerable amount of market growth during the quarter, increasing 8.8 percent from the first quarter of 2011.
Meanwhile, the worldwide disk storage systems market posted strong growth in the first quarter of 2012, according to an IDC report published earlier this month, with EMC leading the market with 29 percent revenue share in the first quarter, followed by NetApp with a 14.1 percent market share. IBM landed in third place with 11.4 percent, and in a statistical tie (when there is less than 1 percent difference in the factory revenues of two or more vendors), HP and Hitachi landed in fourth, with 10.2 percent and 9.4 percent market shares, respectively.