This IDC study provides a forecast of the worldwide enterprise storage systems market for 2012–2016 and discusses forecast assumptions and major market trends. IDC expects that the annual enterprise storage systems industry growth will remain stable within 4–6% range in the following five years, with no dramatic shift in end-user segments within traditional technological segments. However, the underlying driver for the market growth will be shaping the market, redefining how storage will be deployed and consumed, what architectures will be in increasing demand, and what functionality will be expected from storage systems.

"While the enterprise storage systems market remains a mature market, its growth in the following years will majorly be defined by emerging drivers, such as private and public cloud storage infrastructures, big data, and mobile and virtualized applications," says Natalya Yezhkova, research director, IDC Storage Systems. "These drivers will create an additional push for storage and data-efficiency technologies as well as lead to a wider adoption of technologies and tools, which now represent a minor part of the market, for example, scale-out architectures, object-based storage, and automated data management."