Storage Software Sales Show First Decline in More Than 5 Years

For the first time in more than five years, worldwide sales of storage software showed a year over year decline. The IDC Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker said revenue in the first quarter was $2.8 billion, down 5.2 percent from the same quarter a year earlier.

The slump is the result of the worldwide economic recession and the normally slow first quarter, IDC said. It also follows a report from the research firm last week that overall sales of storage hardware fell 18.2 percent compared to a year ago to $5.6 billion, with worldwide factory revenue for external disk storage systems falling 13.6 percent to $4.2 billion. At the same time, IDC said vendors shipped 2,146 petabytes in disk capacity in the quarter, an increase of 14.8% over the previous year.

EMC lead the storage software market as it did the storage hardware market. But a majority of companies displayed either negative or very low year-over-year growth," Michael Margossian, a research analyst for storage software at IDC, said in a statement.

EMC had a 21.8 percent share of the overall market revenue in the first quarter, dopwn from 24.2 percent for the same quarter a year ago. It had revenue of $612 million, down 14.5 percent from the $716 million a year earlier. Symantec came in second, with an 18.9 percent share of revenue share, up from its 17.5 percent share in 2008. It had revenue of $531 million, up 2.5 percent from the $518 million it posted a year ago. IBM was third with 12.2 percent of revenue, a slight decline from the 12.4 percent it had a year earlier. It had revenue of $342 million, down 7 percent from the $368 million it had a year earlier. NetApp was fourth position with 8.3 percent of overall revenue, CA and HP grabbed the next two slots with 4.3 percent and 3.5 percent, respectively, of revenue.

Laura DuBois, research director for storage software at IDC, said in a statement that most storage sub-markets showed declines, most notably device management, replication, and infrastructure markets. She said the file system and management software segments did show some growth. "The overall storage software market was pulled down by the underperforming large companies that make up a bulk of the sub-markets, once they start to recover, they will bring the entire market up with them," she said.

IDC combines eight markets in its overall storage software category, including data protection and recovery, archiving, replication, management, device management, storage infrastructure, file systems, and "other".

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