According to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, the worldwide storage software market grew 10.0% year over year to $2.1 billion in the third quarter of 2005, marking eight consecutive quarters of double-digit year-over-year growth. In the third quarter of 2005, the storage replication market posted the largest gain at 16.8% year-over-year growth, while the back-up and archive market enjoyed a 12.7% growth rate. The storage resource management and the back-up and archive markets continued to represent the largest storage software markets, each representing a third of the market. The file systems software market once again enjoyed strong results with 15.6% year-over-year growth in the third quarter. "We see strong demand in the backup and archive and replication segments driven by fundamental user requirements to protect, recover, and retrieve information, not only in the data center but also in remote and branch office locations," said Laura DuBois, research director for Storage Software at IDC. "This demand is in response to drivers such as application availability and business continuance, disaster recovery, and regulatory compliance." EMC led the overall market this quarter with 29.1% revenue share in the third quarter of 2005. Symantec, with its recent of acquisition of VERITAS, took the second position with 20.0% revenue share, while IBM finished in the third position with 9.4% revenue share, posting a strong result of 12.5% year-over-year growth. Network Appliance and HP once again rounded out the top 5 in a statistical tie with 6.9% and 6.7% revenue share, respectively. Among the top 5 vendors, Network Appliance posted the strongest year-over-year growth in the third quarter at 42.5%. -0- *T Top 5 Vendors, Worldwide Storage Software Revenue, Third Quarter of 2005 (Revenues are in Millions) 3Q05 Market 3Q04 Market Revenue Growth Vendor Revenue Share Revenue Share 3Q05/3Q04 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- EMC $621 29.1% $585 30.1% 6.2% Symantec $427 20.0% 0.0% N/A VERITAS 0.0% $394 20.3% N/A IBM $201 9.4% $179 9.2% 12.5% Network Appliance $148 6.9% $104 5.4% 42.5% Hewlett-Packard $143 6.7% $139 7.1% 2.8% Others $595 27.9% $541 27.9% 10.0% All Vendors $2,135 100.0% $1,942 100.0% 10.0% Note: Symantec is reported as the combined entity of Symantec and VERITAS for 3Q05. 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.