The market for storage management software grew to $5.6bn (£2.9bn) in new license revenue in 2004, up from $5bn the previous year, according to new data from Gartner.
Growth was mainly fuelled 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 $612m in 2004, Gartner said.
EMC led the storage management market, with its share rising to almost 30 percent on sales of $1.66bn. Veritas, which is being acquired by Symantec, was in second place with 18.5 percent share on revenues of $1.04bn. IBM came in third with 12.2 percent on sales of $688m, 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 sales rose 73.5 percent over the course of the year. 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 $6.3bn.
"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."
