[Techtaffy Newsdesk]

The worldwide storage software market closed 2011 with record sales, says IDC. Revenue during the calendar fourth quarter of 2011 (4Q11) increased 10.5% year over year to almost $3.8 billion. This made 4Q11 the largest quarter on record and helped to push the full year revenue total up 11.6% over 2010 to a record high of $14.16 billion.

EMC, IBM, and Symantec were the top ranking storage software suppliers with 25.7%, 19.8%, and 15.4% market shares, respectively. Four out of the seven functional markets tracked by the IDC Storage Software Tracker grew at a double-digit pace in 2011 and continue to exhibit strong growth potential going forward.

Storage & Device Management as well as Data Protection & Recovery helped to propel the market into record territory as the two functional markets increased 17.3% and 13.8% respectively during the quarter.

Eric Sheppard (Research director, Storage Software, IDC): Despite being a mature market, Data Protection & Recovery sales benefited greatly by the challenges introduced by virtualization and the requirement to guarantee high standards of recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) within these environments.

“Growth in the archiving segment continues to be fuelled by the adoption of cloud-based archiving solutions and growth in unstructured file data in both physical and cloud infrastructure,” said Marshall Amaldas, senior research analyst, Storage Software. There were also some large, high profile acquisitions in 2011 that directly impacted Archiving software market share. Autonomy’s acquisition of Iron Mountain was followed by HP’s acquisition of Autonomy, which catapulted HP into the number 2 market share position behind IBM.

[Image Courtesy: EMC]