Backup appliance revenue up slightly

Worldwide factory revenues for backup appliances grew 2.2 percent year-over-year in the third quarter this year, with revenue totaling $813.6 million, according to International Data Corp.’s Worldwide Quarterly Purpose-Built Backup Appliance Tracker.

EMC remains the leader in this market with 61.4% revenue share, or $499 million, while Symantec and its Veritas business came in at No. 2 with 14.3 percent or $116.5 million in revenues. IBM and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) followed, with IBM generating 5.2 percent in market share or $42 million in revenues. HPE garnered 5 percent in revenue share or $40.4 million in revenues. Dell generated about $24 million revenues or 2.9 percent market share.

Vendors in the “other” category generated about $92 million in revenues or 11.3%t market share, which was down from 11.5%  compared to the same period in 2014.

The total market revenues for the backup appliance market was $813.6 million in the third quarter of this year, compared to $796.4 million during the same period in 2014, which is an overall 2.2 percent increase.

IBM did experience a 16% year-over-year decline in revenues while HPE’s revenues increased 38%, generating its $40.2 million compared to $29.2 million in the third quarter of 2014. HPE had the biggest increase, followed by Dell with a 32.2% jump.

IDC defines purpose-built backup appliances as disk-based server engines that are used as a target for backup data and replicated backup data. The appliances are standalone systems for backup but also include features such as deduplication, compression, encryption and remote replication.

The total purpose-built backup appliance open systems factory revenue grew 3.8 percent year-over-year in the third quarter of 2015 with revenues totaling $742.4 million worldwide. The mainframe backup market declined 12.3% during the same period. Total worldwide capacity shipped for purpose-built backup appliances was 831 PB, which is an increase of 22.4% year-over-year.

Liz Conner, research manager for storage systems at IDC, said vendors have upgraded their products to support the cloud and they have placed a bigger focus on deduplication, backup software and a simpler single pane of grass management for backups.