Worldwide storage management software (SMS) market revenue totalled $10.6 billion in 2007, a 12.2 percent increase from 2006 revenue of $9.4 billion, according to Gartner. The market was primarily driven by strong growth in backup/recovery and data replication software. Backup and recovery software grew 11.4 percent in 2007, reaching $2.6 billion, up from $2.3 billion in 2006.

"As companies continue to be pressured by the move to virtualisation and the need to make data more easily recoverable and accessible, they have increased spending for updated backup/recovery and data replication software to help with this transition," said Alan Dayley, research director at Gartner. "Organisations are mainly adding application-specific management options, as well as functionality, that improve protection for remote-office data. ‘Rearchitecting’ of the enterprise backup infrastructure is another primary purchasing trigger for large organisations looking to improve their recovery capabilities."

In 2007, the top five vendors held more than 74 percent of the overall SMS market and are slowly eroding market shares from the smaller vendors, primarily through acquisitions and expansion of their offerings into emerging SMS technologies, such as archiving, deduplication and virtualisation. EMC maintained its leading position and accounted for 26.5 percent of the total software revenue. Among the top five vendors, NetApp exhibited the strongest growth with a 35.5 percent increase from 2006. IBM also exhibited strong growth with 29.3 percent year-over-year.

Hierarchical storage management (HSM) and archive software was the fastest-growing segment, which saw an increase of 29.8 percent in 2007. "With the amount of data being stored by many large companies doubling every year, the need to reduce total cost of ownership is driving the purchase of HSM and archiving tools that enable better use of storage resources, including taking advantage of different price tiers of storage," said Dayley.

From a regional perspective, North America and Western Europe remained the largest regions worldwide followed by Asia/Pacific and Japan, respectively. The Middle East and Africa was the fastest-growing region with 26.1 percent growth in 2007. The performance was driven by commodity prices and expansionary trends in the Gulf countries.