FRAMINGHAM, Mass., September 8, 2008 – According to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, the worldwide storage software market experienced its 19th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth in the second quarter of 2008 (2Q08) with revenues of $3.1 billion, a 14.2% increase over the same quarter one year ago. This was the first time that the worldwide storage software market surpassed $3 billion in revenues in a single quarter.

"The overall storage software market grew at a faster rate in the second quarter than in the usually slow first quarter of the year. The year-over-year growth for 2Q08 was 14.2% compared to 9.4% for 1Q08. Most of the top vendors experienced accelerated growth in the second quarter, which helps to explain the strong Q2 results," said Michael Margossian, research analyst, Storage Software at IDC. "The smaller vendors also had a strong quarter, but had less impact on the overall market than the top vendors."

"The storage software market continued to enjoy strong growth as perceptive users have put more applications and more data under storage software control. Vendors are responding to business-level needs with improved resource utilization, stronger data protection and recovery profiles, finer granularity of storage management, and by meeting more stringent auditing and regulatory realities. The time to value of storage software projects has never been quicker nor needed more," added James Baker, research manager, Storage Software at IDC.

EMC led the overall market with 24.2% revenue share in the second quarter of 2008. Symantec took the second position with 19.1% revenue share, while IBM finished in the third position with 13.3% revenue share. NetApp finished in the fourth position with 7.8% revenue share while HP and CA rounded out the top 5 in a statistical tie with 4.8% and 4.4% revenue share, respectively.

File system, archiving, and data protection and recovery software were the top three performing markets in the second quarter of 2008, with strong growth in each of these markets driven by the top vendors. Data protection and recovery continues to be the largest market in terms of revenue due to ever-increasing regulations and demand for the ability to safeguard data.

Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, September 2008

Notes: Starting in Q2 2007, IBM is reported as the combined entity of IBM and Softek.

Taxonomy Note: IDC has updated its storage software taxonomy to reflect changes in the market over the last several years. The storage software taxonomy includes eight functional markets: data protection and recovery, archive and hierarchical storage management (HSM) (including email archiving), storage replication, storage management, storage device management, storage infrastructure, file system, and "other".

IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker is a quantitative tool for analyzing the global storage software market. This Tracker counts new license and maintenance revenues quarterly and provides data segmentations by vendor, submarket, functional product family, and region. It further characterizes the storage resource management (SRM) and storage replication markets by the execution location of the software within the host, fabric, appliance or storage system.

For more information about IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, please contact Hoang Nguyen at 508-935-4718 or hnguyen@idc.com.

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