According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, the worldwide storage software market experienced its 18th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth in the first quarter of 2008 with revenues of $2.9 billion, a 9.4% increase over the same quarter one year ago.

“Overall market growth was 9.4% year-over-year with the Data Protection and Recovery and Storage Replication software markets being the primary drivers. Three out of the top five vendors in the Data Protection and Recovery Software market posted double-digit growth rates, and in the Storage Replication software market the top four suppliers posted double-digit growth rates,” noted Michael Margossian, research analyst, Storage Software at IDC. “The first quarter of the calendar year can be slow for some vendors, but the market showed relatively strong growth from a year ago.”

"The storage software market continues to see solid growth with firms investing in software to help facilitate management, access to and protection, retention and recovery of increasing volumes of storage capacity. Leading indicators for continued growth in the storage software market include compressing recovery times, tighter SLAs, the need to improve resource utilization, and ongoing regulatory and discovery pressures. While meeting these escalating business needs, firms need to manage increasing storage capacities while at once reducing data center space, power and cooling requirements," added Laura DuBois, program director for Storage Software.

EMC led the overall market with 24.9% revenue share in the first quarter of 2008. Symantec took the second position with 17.9% revenue share, while IBM finished in the third position with 12.8% revenue share. NetApp finished in the fourth position with 8.5% revenue share while HP and CA round out the top 5 in a statistical tie with 4.4% revenue share each.