In the first quarter of 2009, the worldwide storage software market experienced its first decline in 21 consecutive quarters of year-over-year growth, according to IDC's 'Worldwide quarterly storage software tracker'.
Overall storage software market revenue was $2.8 billion, a 5.2% decline over the same quarter one year ago. Michael Margossian, storage software research analyst at IDC, attributed the poor results to a combination of the usual first-quarter slowdown and the continuing economic downturn.
Most sub-markets declined from the previous year's first quarter, but the worst affected were the device management, replication, and infrastructure markets. These market segments are all closely aligned with the storage systems themselves, points out Laura DuBois, IDC's research director for storage software.
IDC's 'Worldwide quarterly storage software tracker' is a quantitative tool for analysing the global storage software market. It counts new licence and maintenance revenues quarterly and provides data segmentations by vendor, submarket, functional product family, and region.
DuBois blamed “underperforming large companies” for the slump. She noted that these underperformers make up the bulk of the sub-markets and argued that once they start to recover, “they will bring the entire market up with them”.
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