Storage Software Market Up; EMC Remains On Top

The worldwide storage-management-software market rose more than 12 percent last year, as EMC held on to the top spot, followed, in order, by Veritas Software and IBM, a market research firm said Friday.

New license revenue grew to $5.6 billion, compared with $5 billion in 2003,Gartner Inc. said. The increase was driven primarily by strong sales in storage-resource-management software, which rose nearly 40 percent to $612 million last year.

SRM software includes products that monitor and manage the capacity and performance across multiple storage and server platforms.

"Storage resource management was the second smallest segment in 2004, but it is expected to continue to record fast growth as enterprises look to better manage storage capacity utilization and begin to automate some of the management functions," Gartner analyst Carolyn DiCenzo said. "For some companies, the need to manage IT as a utility with service-level agreements between IT and the business units is also driving new requirements and increased interest in SRM."

The storage-management-software market as a whole is expected to increase by another 12 percent this year, with new license revenue projected to reach $6.3 billion.EMC, Veritas, IBM, and Computer Associates International remained the top four vendors this year based on new license revenue. Network Appliance showed the strongest growth of the top 10 vendors, moving to No. 5 from No. 7.

The remaining top 10 vendors in order were Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi/HDS, StorageTek, Symantec and BMC Software.