Industry analyst IDC reported Sept. 7 that the worldwide storage software sector enjoyed a small revenue gain year-over-year in the second quarter of 2010 but also that market numbers dropped a bit from the first quarter.
In its quarterly Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker report, IDC said the storage software market banked revenues of nearly $3 billion, amounting to 3.3 percent growth over the same quarter a year ago.
However, the research also showed a 2.3 percent revenue decrease from the previous three months.
IDC said most of the annual revenue gain came from the companies that claimed the three biggest shares of the market-not from the smaller companies and startups.
“Gains in the storage software market in the second quarter were largely the result of overall growth from some of the large suppliers,” said Laura DuBois, IDC’s program vice president of storage software. “The growth for the quarter came from EMC (up 13.3 percent year over year), IBM (up 10.6 percent) and NetApp (up 6.0 percent).”
From a segment perspective, DuBois said, growth is emanating from spending in four segments of storage software: data protection and recovery (up 4.9 percent year over year), archiving (up 8.2 percent), storage management (up 5.8 percent), and storage infrastructure (up 12.7 percent).
The storage software revenue growth compared favorably with worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenues, which posted year-over-year growth of 20.4 percent and totaled $5 billion in the second quarter of 2010, DuBois said.