The FINANCIAL — According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Asia/Pacific Quarterly Enterprise Storage Tracker India, the external storage market witnessed a double-digit year-on-year growth in vendor revenue in the first quarter of 2015 and stood at USD 70.2 million.
Growth in the storage market was largely driven by government initiatives (like UID and e-governance projects) and large multi-million dollar technology refresh deals in the banking vertical. The market is expected to witness further growth due to increased storage demand from e-commerce companies, healthcare, and online educational institutes coupled with the traditional verticals, in the coming quarters, according to IDC.
Increased acceptance of all-flash arrays is seen across organizations to improve efficiency in workloads like VDI, OLTP and BI etc. Also, the market is witnessing increased deployments of hybrid-flash arrays as it caters to the needs of today’s organizations with both capacity and performance embedded in a single system.
SMBs are increasingly looking at deploying SaaS services like Office 365, Salesforce, etc. which is expected to cannibalize the traditional storage system business by some magnitude in the coming quarters. SaaS providers would need the additional storage systems to cater to this demand but some of them are expected to prefer storage component manufacturers or white box players rather than traditional vendors.
Communications & media, banking, and professional services continue to be the dominant verticals. While the government segment has seen increased spending, manufacturing saw a decline as compared to Q4 2014 but is expected to bounce back in the coming quarters.
According to Dileep Nadimpalli, Senior Market Analyst, Storage, IDC India, “Organizations are demanding innovative solutions with business outcome led pricing, which can integrate, process and analyse the large volumes of existing data to give them actionable recommendations.”
Gaurav Sharma, Research Manager, Enterprise Computing, IDC India says, “New business models and renewed competition is forcing organizations of all sizes to revisit their business strategy. A key component of this is the structured and unstructured data that needs to be analysed across departments to contribute to this strategy, marketing programs, product positioning and customer delight. This is pushing organizations to revisit their storage architectures to accommodate more efficient technologies, hybrid arrays and storage management tools to be able to support this transition.”
Major Vendors Analysis
EMC continued to lead the market and increased its share to 33.5% from 31.2%, mostly due to multi-million dollar deals from government and telecom verticals. HP displaced IBM to gain the 2nd spot with 15% market share in Q1 2015. IBM and Netapp saw negative growth while HDS and Dell witnessed marginal growth (quarter-on-quarter).
India Storage Systems Forecast
The external enterprise storage systems market is expected to recover after a considerable decline in CY 2014. Recent government initiatives like Make in India and Digitization coupled with state-level initiatives would drive the storage demand further, both directly and indirectly. In addition, refresh deals across verticals, especially in the banking and telecom verticals, are also expected in the coming quarters.
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