"The storage software market was able to increase in typical fourth quarter fashion, with all top six vendors showing positive growth from the third quarter," said Michael Margossian, Associate Research Analyst, Storage Software at IDC. "Data protection and recovery was once again a strong market with the top four vendors showing growth from a year ago. IBM had the strongest year-over-year growth with revenues up 19.3 percent from the fourth quarter of 2008, while EMC enjoyed the greatest gains over the third quarter -- a 13.1 percent increase -- with the help of strong hardware growth."

"Sequential and year-over-year growth has returned for storage software, suggesting the market has started to show signs of recovery, said Laura DuBois, Research Director, Storage Software."Another sign that bodes well for the segment is that, as storage consumes larger portions of IT budgets, driven by the exponential growth of data, the need for storage management and efficiency increases. Into 2010, storage capital investments are aimed at making more efficient and reliable use of data, data storage, and data management resources," she added.

EMC led the overall market with 23.7 percent revenue share in the fourth quarter of 2009. Symantec held onto the second position with 17.5 percent revenue share, while IBM finished in the third position with 13.2 percent revenue share. NetApp finished in the fourth position with 7.9 percent revenue share while HP and CA rounded out the top 5 with a statistical tie with 3.9 percent and 3.8 percent revenue share respectively.