EMC, IBM, Symantec are top vendors in storage software market

Global storage software market increased 6.3 percent year over year during the second calendar quarter of 2014, with revenue reaching nearly $3.8 billion, according to the market research firm IDC.

Data Protection & Recovery software sales were up 10.2 percent year over year to $1.45 billion in sales. Sales of storage infrastructure software were up 10.8 percent year over year to $448 million; and storage & device management software sales were up 4.1 percent year over year to $708 mil-lion.

“The storage software market experienced broad growth across most functional markets in the second quarter,” said Eric Sheppard, research director, Storage Software at IDC. “Sales of data pro-tection and recovery software accounted for almost 60 percent of the net-new spending during the quarter, driven by a market-wide move to improve application resiliency, continued uptake in ap-pliance-based offerings, and healthy attach rates within the integrated systems market.”

The second quarter of 2014 marks the first time IDC has measured the size of the software-defined storage platforms (SDS-P) market. Sales of SDS-P were just 3.5 percent of the total market value, but grew more than 15.7 percent during the quarter.

Software-defined storage platforms is a new functional market added to the total storage software market that covers block, file, object, and/or hyperconverged software offerings that enable the cre-ation of a storage system. IDC refers to software-defined storage as platforms that deliver the full suite of storage services via a software stack that uses (but is not dependent on) commodity hard-ware built with off-the-shelf components.

EMC, IBM, and Symantec were the top ranking storage software suppliers with market shares of 25.9 percent, 16 percent, and 13.3 percent, respectively, IDC said.