It makes sense that the WW purpose-built backup appliance would be suffering. Cloud-based data gets IaaS provider DR, while cloud backup software handles day-to-day backup, and modern object storage systems optimize archiving.

Back in April of 2012, IDC produced a PBBA market analysis that predicted that the PBBA market would be $5.9 billion by the end of 2016.

Well, here we are at the end of 2016, and guess what? The PBBA market is well short of that.

How short?
Eyeballing the current stats, it looks like the IDC stats for 2016 will come in at about $3.5B, 40% below the 2012 IDC prediction.

Unlike other mature markets, it also appears that leader EMC’s share, courtesy of the Data Domain acquisition, is also drifting down from its ≈65% share in 2012 to a still dominant ≈60% in 2016. I would have expected the incumbent to pick up share as other vendors, starved for revenue, retreated.

The StorageMojo take
The cloud’s collateral damage to the legacy IT vendors continues to spread. A few billion here and a few billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.

And yet, as I recently noted on ZDNet, users still overspend on IT infrastructure – both physical and virtual – by many 10s of billions of dollars every year. With the growing transparency of IT costs – check out this CloudPhysics quarterly report, the historical and organizational forces that favor overspending are weakening.

Vendors who can show advantages in cost and efficiency are best positioned for continued slow-motion clash between on-prem and cloud infrastructure.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. Sure, the IDC forecast could have been based on silly assumptions, but I don’t think so.