European storage market growth set to continue says Macarthur Stroud International

Research firm Macarthur Stroud International has made available selected figures on the pan-European storage market. The Surbiton-based company observed that the industry is still very much experiencing an overall positive growth, although certain areas will particularly thrive over the next few years.

Macarthur Stroud International revealed how the storage software market will hold on to its top spot and nearly reach the 4 billion euro mark in 2004, subsequently growing at an impressive 26% per annum until 2007. As a result, services opportunities are also growing. With the need to consolidate resources and deliver more resilient infrastructures and secure information management practices, the growth in storage software will also drive the opportunity for storage services providers.

Data protection will also continue to be a growth segment, with end users moving their disaster recovery strategy up the priority list and increasing the demand for a changing architecture that will support both high-performance back-up and recovery strategies and continuous business operations.

In addition, Macarthur Stroud International found that Storage Resources Management (SRM) in the future will support managed infrastructures as users deploy the most appropriate solutions to address legal and regulatory requirements with an ILM strategy.

'The storage market is still one of the healthiest IT segments at the moment and the fierce competition between the vendors is evidence to that,' said Hamish Macarthur, CEO and founder of Macarthur Stroud International. 'The presence of more mature technologies such as Fibre Channel is driving prices down while the appearance of newer standards and the convergence of storage and optics are pushing the technological boundaries. End users are in a very good position right now because there is a solution to fit every organisation and every budget.'

Hamish Macarthur will be delivering the Storage Expo (www.storage-expo.com) opening keynote address on Thursday 14th October at 11:00 am, when he will discuss the roadmap of current trends and directions in storage management.