EMC dominates purpose-built backup appliance market

A greater emphasis on backup and deduplication software, meeting recovery objectives and the ability to tier ot the cloud, along with increased ease of use, has seen an increase in worldwide purpose-built backup appliance sales.

IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Purpose-build Backup Appliance Tracker shows factory revenues were up 4.1% year on year for the fourth quarter of 2015, with full year factory revenue up 2.5% to US$3.3 billion.

Q4 saw factory revenue hit $1.0 billion – only the second time revenue has hit the billion dollar market in any given quarter.

EMC dominated the market, claiming 61.4% of market share for the full year – and a whopping $2.0 billion in factory revenue, up 1.2% year on year, and with 67.7% of the Q4 market share.

Symantec was a distant second for the full year, with 14.3% share and $479 million in factory revenue.

IBM and HPE tied for third with IBM claiming 5% share and $165.7 million in revenue for the full year, and HPE gaining 4.5% share and $150 million.

It was a case of differing fortunes for IBM and HPE, with IBM's share down 19.5% year on year, while HPE was up 11.7%.

Barracuda rounded out the top five vendors for the full year, with 2.6% share and $88.1 million in factory revenue. The vendor was the big mover of the year, up 32.6%, however, it failed to make the top five for Q4 factory revenue, beaten out of fifth place by Dell, which gained 2.3% of Q4 market share, behind EMC, Symantec, IBM and HPE.

The open systems segment of the market dominated in Q4, with total purpose-built backup appliance open systems factory revenues up 6% year on year, recording revenue of $958 million, while the mainframe market declined 12.8% for the same period.

IDC says the total worldwide purpose-built backup appliance capacity shipped for Q4 hit 1160 petabytes, up 25.6% year on year, while annual capacity was up 23.1% to 3.30 exabytes.

Liz Conner, IDC research manager for storage systems, says growth in the market remained strong in Q4.

"Despite the continued commoditisation of storage hardware, PBBA systems vendors are adapting, putting greater emphasis on backup and deduplication software, meeting recovery objectives, the ability it tier to the cloud and increased ease of use," Conner says.

"The results are more flexible and gagile product that is helping to meet a wider range of data protection needs.