According to IDC, worldwide purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA) factory revenues grew 8.5 percent year over year totaling US$783.2 million in the second quarter of 2014 (2Q14). Total PBBA open systems factory revenue increased 11.1 percent year over year in 2Q14 with revenues totaling US$712.7 million while the mainframe market experienced a decline of -12.2 percent for the same period. Total worldwide PBBA capacity shipped, for open systems and mainframe PBBA systems, reached 487,574 terabytes, an increase of 19.5 percent year over year.
 
"Growth in the worldwide PBBA market came roaring back in the second quarter after a dismal start in the first quarter," said Robert Amatruda, Research Director, Data Protection and Recovery. "Customers continue to embrace and understand the value that appliance form factors bring to their environments to meet their growing data protection and recovery challenges."
 
EMC maintained its lead in the overall PBBA market with 63.7 percent revenue share in the second quarter, followed by Symantec with 13.9 percent share. IBM and HP posted 6.8 percent and 3.9 percent market share, respectively. Barracuda remains the number five PBBA vendor holding a 2.0 percent share of the worldwide market.
 
Top 5 Vendors, Worldwide PBBA Factory Revenue, Market Share, and Year-Over-Year Growth, Second Quarter of 2014 (Revenues in $ Millions)

Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Purpose-Built Backup Appliance Tracker, September 18, 2014
 
IDC defines a purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA) as a standalone disk-based solution that utilizes software, disk arrays, server engine(s), or nodes that are used for a target for backup data and specifically data coming from a backup application (e.g., NetWorker, NetBackup, TSM, and Backup Exec) or can be tightly integrated with the backup software to catalog, index, schedule, and perform data movement. The PBBA products are deployed in standalone configurations or as gateways. PBBA solutions deployed in a gateway configuration connect to and store backup data on general-purpose storage. Here, the gateway device is serving as the component that is purpose built solely for backup and not for supporting any other workload or application. Regardless of packaging (as an appliance or gateway), PBBAs can have multiple interfaces or protocols. Also, PBBAs often can provide and receive replication to or from remote sites and a secondary PBBA for the purpose of disaster recovery (DR).