The worldwide storage software market grew 10 percent year over year to US$2.1 billion in the third quarter of 2005, marking eight consecutive quarters of double-digit year-over-year growth, according to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker.

In the third quarter of 2005, the storage replication market posted the largest gain at 16.8 percent year-over-year growth, while the back-up and archive market saw a 12.7 percent 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 percent 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 percent revenue share in the third quarter of 2005. Symantec, with its acquisition of Veritas, took the second position with 20.0 percent revenue share, while IBM finished in the third position with 9.4 percent revenue share, posting a strong result of 12.5 percent year-over-year growth. Network Appliance and HP once again rounded out the top 5 in a statistical tie with 6.9 percent and 6.7 percent revenue share, respectively. Among the top 5 vendors, Network Appliance posted the strongest year-over-year growth in the third quarter at 42.5 percent.