This IDC study, which is a translation of the Japanese report IDC #J13450101, presents the Japan storage software market's revenue performance in 1H10, as well as forecasts from 2012 to 2016. IDC classifies the storage software market into the following seven functional markets and provides an analysis of each functional market: data protection and recovery software, storage replication software, archive software, storage and device management software, storage infrastructure software, file system software, and other storage software. It also analyzes the market size and trends by OS type: mainframe, Unix, Windows, and Linux.

The Japan storage market in 1H12 is seeing a difference between vendors with increased revenue and those with decreased revenue. This has also resulted in varying storage software performances. The overall storage industry is not in a boom. In a period of intense competition by vendors, storage software business is required to contribute to improving storage sales competitiveness instead of profits.

"While operation efficiency improves in the server and network segments, a huge disparity appears in the progress of storage infrastructural reforms by users. Focusing on the method of approaching a particular user segment will be an important option in future storage business. In such situations, the development and sales strategies of storage software would be the key to deciding the future direction of storage business," says Yasusuke Suzuki, research manager, Storage Systems, IDC Japan.