Storage software continues good run
Market expected to remain strong as companies prepare to move toward compliance with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley.
Growth was mainly fueled by buoyancy in sales of storage resource management, which includes products to manage multiple storage devices and servers. This segment grew 30.8 percent to reach $612 million in 2004, Gartner said.
EMC led the storage management market, with its share rising to almost 30 percent on sales of $1.66 billion. Veritas, which is being acquired by Symantec, was in second place with 18.5 percent share on revenues of $1.04 billion. IBM came in third with 12.2 percent on sales of $688 million, and Computer Associates ranked fourth with a 5.3 percent share, much lower than in 2003.
The biggest gain was made by Network Appliance, whose year-over-year sales rose 73.5 percent. The company moved up to fifth place from seventh the year before.
Gartner said the need for companies to comply with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley will continue to drive the market for archiving and data protection products. During 2005, Gartner said, license revenue from global storage management software could reach $6.3 billion.
"The need to better incorporate electronic records into a total records management solution will offer real opportunity for storage vendors, but customers will need to look beyond the hype to determine exactly how a specific storage product will fit into their process," Carolyn DiCenzo, research vice president at Gartner, said in a statement. "Storage vendors will play a significant part in providing some of the tools needed to do information life cycle management, but understanding the content will be a key component that will take more than just storage tools."