[Techtaffy Newsdesk]

The worldwide storage software market closed the first quarter of 2012 (1Q12) higher than same quarter from one year ago,  says IDC.  But the overall worldwide storage market is growing at a slower rate than had been experienced at any time in the last two years. Revenue during 1Q12 increased 3.3% year over year to $3.5 billion.

While the market continues to see healthy demand for storage software products, the rate of growth within the market has slowed to levels not seen since 2009. “The first quarter saw decidedly mixed results,” said Eric Sheppard, research director, Storage Software at IDC. “Incremental spending attributable to recent product refreshes have run their course within some functional markets, such as storage infrastructure software. Meanwhile, continued fine-tuning of product pricing, packaging and messaging is helping to draw out new investments within other markets, such as the Data protection and recovery market.”

EMC, IBM, and Symantec were once again the top ranking storage software suppliers with 24%, 15.7%, and 14.8% market shares, respectively. CommVault and IBM experienced the largest organic growth during the quarter with 26.2% and 18.4% year-over-year increases. HP’s recent acquisition of Autonomy helped drive 72.6% year-over-year growth for the company during the quarter.

Data Protection and Recovery and Archiving Software were the two fastest growing sub-markets with year-over-year growth rates of 5.5% and 5.0% respectively, generating $1.25 billion and $411 million in total revenues. Companies with more than 1,000 employees made up the biggest component of the market with $1.6 billion in storage software investments during the quarter. Sales were flat within this segment of the market, however, at 0.4% year over year. Storage software investments within Government and Education were also relatively flat, experiencing only 1.2% year-over-year revenue growth. Small and medium sized companies (i.e., companies with fewer than 500 employees) drove a considerable amount of market growth during the quarter, increasing 8.8% compared to 1Q11.

[Image Courtesy: IBM]