IDC, in a recent market forecast report on the purpose built backup appliance (PBBA) market, revised the growth rate for the market upward. There are some key takeaways from this report that should be considered and analysis of it is important not only for the industry but also for the users of the technology.

In looking at the numbers, IDC revised the year-over-year 2011 PBBA market growth rate by 65% from their initial forecast back in May of 2011, from 2.1 billion to almost 2.8 billion for the year. This proves that the PBBA Market is a healthy, growing market that in our opinion still has plenty of “green field” opportunities. The clear market leader, according to IDC, is EMC with over 62% of the market. The products that make up EMC’s share of PBBA market are Data Domain, Avamar and Disk Library for mainframe. This represents a substantial lead over their nearest competitor (IBM) who has about 20% of the market.

The expectation for 2012 was also raised significantly, showing an over 36% increase from the previous forecast to 3.8 billion. Overall the market is set to show a 5 year compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 25%.

Storage Switzerland believes that this growth and the need to revise the numbers upward is evidence that backup software solutions that have added a deduplication feature are not adversely impacting the growth of the PBBA market. Conventional wisdom, one that we did not subscribe to, was that eventually the concept of deduplication on a stand-alone appliance would fade and that deduplication would simply become a feature enabled through the backup application.

A key capability that companies like EMC have developed is the ability to integrate their PBBA products with their own backup applications, yet still let products like Data Domain work with customers’ backup applications of choice or with their existing backup software. While they may not get the full range of benefits that come with a feature like EMC’s DD Boost integration, they do maintain a level of choice. This may be a more practical approach to the enterprise data protection problem than a “one size fits all” strategy.

IDC believes that growth of the PBBA market will slow in 2014 and 2015. For example they show the market only growing from 5 billion to 5.2 billion between 2014 and 2015.  The slowdown in growth could be caused by additional software applications providing some form of the deduplication functionality that is common within PBBA solutions.

2014 and beyond may have more potential than that for several reasons. First, as discussed above we believe that the software backup application market will remain fragmented and at some point a centralized PBBA will be required to provide maximum redundancy elimination from the variety of backup applications that is likely to continue to exist in the data center.

Second, Storage Switzerland believes that the “green field” situation that is fueling the PBBA market currently is more widespread than is commonly reported, and that PBBA will be an important technology to data centers that are considered too small to justify a PBBA today. The “S” part of the SMB market is virtually untapped and companies are just now positioning products to meet those needs.

Third, Storage Switzerland believes that in the 2014-2015 timeframe there will be a demand arising from early adopters of PBBAs looking to upgrade their first generation hardware.

Storage Swiss Take

IDC’s upward revision of their report on the PBBA market is a solid sign that these devices are being increasingly adopted into data centers of all sizes. There will continue to be a downward push of systems into the SMB market and there will continue to be enhancements for the high-end enterprise. Both situations should lead to continued and robust growth throughout this decade.

EMC is a client of Storage Switzerland 

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