The recovery is here and it's global. It's the second consecutive quarter of growth for storage. IDC's storage tracker shows the world storage software market growing 23.3 percent in Jan-Mar 2004, over the same quarter last year, reaching $1.85 billion in total revenue.

Releasing the data at an event organized by EMC in Boston, close to IDC  headquarters, IDC storage software research director Bill North said  that storage tended to outstrip the tech industry's average growth - both negative and positive. Post the dot com crash, IT industry revenues dropped, and storage crashed severely.

Now, continuing the momentum from Q4/2004, all the major storage software companies have posted double-digit growth. EMC is the largest of these, with 30 percent market share following the Legato acquisition, followed by Veritas at 23 percent, and CA at just under 10 percent.

Earlier this month, IDC had announced the third consecutive quarter of year on year growth for external disk storage systems, which grew 6.5 percent to $3.5 billion in Q1/04. The overall disk storage market grew a little slower at 3.5 percent, indicating that most of the growth happened in external storage.

Despite the falling cost of storage, though, storage capacity continues to outpace revenue growth, growing nearly 40 percent to 247 petabytes (1 petabyte = 1,000 terabytes) shipped in Q1/04. EMC topped the list at 20 percent share, taking the leadership position away from HP (18 percent), and followed by IBM at 12 percent, Hitachi at 10 percent and Sun 
and Dell at six percent to seven percent of the $3.5 billion market in Q1/04.

Prasanto K Roy
CyberMedia News 
The author traveled at the hospitality of EMC.

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