According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, the worldwide storage software market experienced its 14th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth in the first quarter of 2007 with revenues of $2.7 billion, an 11.4% increase over the same quarter one year ago.

"Storage software continues to exhibit positive year-over-year performance, driven by growth in the archiving, replication and file system software markets and a surge in demand for storage management software," said Rhoda Phillips, research manager for Storage Software at IDC. “Businesses continue to implement solutions that can improve availability, recovery and information access across heterogeneous environments.”

EMC led the overall market this quarter with 25.1% revenue share in the first quarter of 2007. Symantec took the second position with 17.7% revenue share, while IBM finished in the third position with 12.3% revenue share. Network Appliance finished in the fourth position with 10.0% revenue share. Again, CA and HP rounded out the top 5 in a statistical tie both with 4.4% revenue share, respectively.

Taxonomy Note: IDC has updated its storage software taxonomy to reflect changes in the market over the last several years. The storage software taxonomy includes eight functional markets: data protection and recovery, archive and hierarchical storage management (HSM) (including email archiving), storage replication, storage management, storage device management, storage infrastructure, file system, and "other".

IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker is a quantitative tool for analyzing the global storage software market. This Tracker counts new license and maintenance revenues quarterly and provides data segmentations by vendor, submarket, functional product family, and region. It further characterizes the storage resource management (SRM) and storage replication markets by the execution location of the software within the host, fabric, appliance or storage system.

For more information about this product, please contact Hey-Sung Han at 508-935-4026 or hshan@idc.com.

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