Worldwide Enterprise Storage Systems 2009-2013 Forecast: Economic Crisis Driving Quest for Storage Efficiency and Emerging Architectures

This IDC study provides a forecast of the worldwide enterprise storage systems market for 2009–2013 as well as discussion of assumptions and major market trends. As the economic crisis expands its devastating impact on IT spending, the enterprise storage systems market, along with other IT segments, has entered a period of decline. At the same time, the impact of the crisis on the storage systems market will be moderate and relatively short term as the volume of digital information demanding more storage continues to increase.

"The economic crisis will become, to some degree, a tipping point for the storage industry," says Natalya Yezhkova, research manager, Storage Systems. "End users become more interested in and system suppliers have intellectual property to deliver more efficient storage solutions based on emerging flexible cost saving architectures and technologies designed to optimize storage utilization rates and energy costs."

"The "serverization" will accelerate the entry of many traditional application software companies into the storage market," says Richard Villars, vice president, Storage and IT Executive Strategies. "These companies will layer a mix of standard and custom software on top of new 'universal' storage modules to create targeted role-based storage systems."