The storage software market had its first year-over-year decline in more than five years according to latest industry assessments, with the emergence of new options such as cloud computing being seen as contributing to the stall in spending.
According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, worldwide sales of storage software market showed its first decline in 21 consecutive quarters of year-over-year growth in the first quarter of 2009 (1Q09) with revenues of $2.8 billion. This represented a fall of 5.2% against the same quarter one year ago.
John Rollason of NetApp said, “IT projects have suffered from budget freeze recently as businesses wait and see how markets recover before committing to spending, so we’re not surprised at the downturn.”
He suggested that IT directors were taking time to evaluate whether to buy or outsource areas of their storage services. “The market expects to see growth as the need to provision future data management and virtualised environments moves up the list of ‘must-do’ projects,” he added.
The analysis by IDC covered software this sold for device management, replication and file system and management. The analyst house said that the market has been 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.
EMC led the overall market with 21.8% revenue share in the first quarter of 2009. Symantec held onto the second position with 18.9% revenue share, while IBM finished in the third position with 12.2% revenue share.
NetApp finished in the fourth position with 8.3% revenue share while CA and HP rounded out the top 5 with 4.3% and 3.5% revenue share, respectively.
