The overall decline of the storage market has finally been reflected in the market for storage software, with IDC reporting the storage sector’s first decline after 21 consecutive years of growth.

The $2.8 billion market, which includes technologies such as device management, replication, data protection and backup/archiving, shrank 5.2% according to IDC’s quarterly storage software tracker.

IDC said the market was pulled down because of underperforming large companies, although several subsectors such as file system and management software showed growth.

EMC held its position as market leader at 21.8%, ahead of Symantec with 18.9%, despite a 14.5% plunge in revenue in the first quarter of 2009. NetApp’s market share remained steady in third place at 8.3%, although its revenues were down 4.7%. Symantec was the only company in the top five to show revenue growth (2.5%).