History (1999): WW Storage Management Software to Top $6.6 Billion in 2003

As the SAN market evolves, the WW storage management software market will benefit with revenue increasing from $2.6 billion in 1998 to more than $6.6 billion in 2003, according to Dataquest’ Storage Management Market Report Forecast: 1999 to 2003.

“SANs, intelligent storage servers, and new data replication techniques will transform the way storage backup and recovery is accomplished,” said Carolyn DiCenzo, principal analyst, Dataquest. “The resulting storage management environment will demand consistent, integrated, and automated tools.”

Storage management represents all of the tools needed to manage capacity, performance, and availability of data stored on disks, tapes, and optical devices.

The research firm divides the storage management market into three major segments:

1/ Storage infrastructure products provide basic data organization functions such as file systems, volume management, and physical replication to ensure data integrity and availability by offering fast failure recovery and data redundancy. This storage infrastructure products segment reached $626 million in 1998, and it is expected to have revenue at $1.9 billion in 2003.

2/ Data management products include backup, restore, archive, and HSM tools. The worldwide storage management software market is led by this segment, which accounted for nearly $1.6 billion in 1998, and its forecast to reach $3 billion by 2003.

3/ Enterprise SRM products provide management of various storage resources on the network including magnetic disk, tape, and optical media. It is the segment projected to show the strongest growth, with revenue at $382 million in 1998, growing to $1.7 billion in 2003.

“The opportunities for vendors with software solutions in the storage management area have never been greater,” said DiCenzo. “Distributed computing initiatives are creating storage environments that are diverse in terms of platform type, size, and location. Specialized storage availability management tools are beginning to emerge, and there is a requirement for integration with network and systems management software. Storage hardware vendors are differentiating their products by either embedded or selling value-added storage management software.”

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 139 on August 1999 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.