Strong sales of storage replication products helped the worldwide storage software market to reach $1.6bn in the second quarter of 2003, a 7.3 per cent year-on-year increase.

According to IDC, the storage replication software sector saw the largest gain, growing 8.5 per cent in the second quarter of the year.

Growth in the back-up and archive software space, which is the largest segment of this market, reached 7.3 per cent.

The storage resource management market, IDC found, grew less than the overall market, at 6.1 per cent.

Bill North, storage software research director at IDC, said: "The markets for both storage replication software and backup and archive software are being accelerated by renewed customer emphasis on data protection and disaster recovery, as well as recent record retention and retrieval regulations.

"Meanwhile, the storage resource management market faces continued budget priority pressures, which account for its more modest gains."

The analyst firm's Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker found that, since the fourth quarter of 2002, the storage software vendor leader board has remained unchanged.

EMC maintained its lead with a 26 per cent revenue share, gaining nearly 1.5 percentage points since the first quarter of 2003.

Veritas is in second place, with Computer Associates and IBM tied for fourth position. Hewlett-Packard followed in fifth place.

EMC and HP were the only two vendors among the top five to post double-digit sequential revenue growth, at 13.6 and 10 per cent respectively.