Storage Market Surges Ahead on Tech Adoption

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With India establishing itself as a primary destination for not only IT services but also on the technology adoption arena, storage segment is surely moving ahead on the priority shopping list for CIOs and as a result, storage market is surging ahead with optimism today.

Some of the segments that are driving storage sales and Telecom, manufacturing, IT/ITeS along with banking were the major drivers for IT spending and accounted for more than 3/4th of the storage revenues coming from different vendors in the storage ecosystem.

IT and banking have been on the dominating front when it comes to deploying cutting-edge storage systems in the country. Banking sector is leading the spending on high-end storage while manufacturing, telecom and IT spend more on mid range and entry level storage systems coming in from the global vendors. Pushed by various e-governance related IT adoption initiatives, the government emerges as the focused vertical for the major vendors with upcoming greenfield opportunities for storage demand.

While the enterprise or even the end users have information or raw data growing at moderate to high double-digit rates, they are refraining from spending more on storage systems. Instead they are looking at managing data growth by rationalizing the use of available storage applications, bringing more storage efficiencies, many a times through deduplication, thin provisioning and storage virtualization solutions for the end user community.


According to industry estimates, about 70 per cent of the budgets of CIOs or IT decision makers goes towards continuously maintaining storage infrastructure which is a big problem, and hence they are then left with very little to spend on research and development towards new innovation projects that might be more important to their long term business objectives.

Additionally, there is a constant pressure to improve efficiency, reduce labour and facilitate automated provisioning of resources for higher asset utilization and provisioning of workloads to where assets are sitting idle. All this is urgiung the CIO community to look at better storage options that can help them in their long term vision and deliver a better sustainability plan.

Customers are increasingly getting over cautious about IT spending and churning out value from money spent. Investment protection, lower TCO, SLA improvements are increasingly getting higher and higher on the checklist of the IT procurement and decision makers checklist. Hence, storage virtualization and management has showed increased adoption across various industry verticals especially where customers are upgrading their data centers to increase efficiencies and look for better return on their investments.

On the other hand, cloud service providers had some significant wins to showcase their storage infrastructure provision capabilities through new applications such as Platform as a service, Infrastructure as a service or Software-as-a-Service. In today’s fast paced changing world of IT, storage on cloud is increasingly being looked upon with interest as well as apprehension. Some users see it as a significant cost reduction and investment protection tool while others feel potential loss of control and governance of their information.

As far as new technology adoption is concerned, Virtualization continues to drive storage spending along with demand for unstructured data management arising out of file sharing and surveillance solutions deployment. Storage vendors are also reshaping their strategy as an information management solution provider, trying to deliver more value to customers with less expenditure on their minds.