'External storage market witnesses significant growth'

India's external storage market witnessed a significant year-on-year growth (in vendor revenue) and stood at $73.9 million -- up by 16 percent -- in the third quarter of 2015, IDC's Asia/Pacific Quarterly Enterprise Storage Tracker said on Friday.

The growth was achieved due to increased spending across verticals, International Data Corporation India said in a statement here.

Communications and media and banking verticals' investments in storage technology resulted in strong growth numbers for Q3 2015. Digital transformation projects across verticals witnessed huge uptake and are also expected to contribute further in the near future, it added.

Adoption and acceptance of Hybrid Flash Arrays across organisations to meet both capacity and performance demands in a single box is on the rise. Adoption of all flash arrays has also gained momentum across organisations.

Optimisation and productivity enhancement remain the key business priorities across organisations. Adoption of technologies like software defined storage and virtualisation are getting increased acceptance to achieve these priorities.

Government spending is expected to increase significantly due to recent initiatives on 'Digital India' and 'Smart Cities'.

"Growing volume of data is seen across verticals due to increased adoption of third platform technologies, BC/DR, surveillance and digital transformation are driving storage demand.

"Small storage vendors are gaining increased acceptance as they promise better capacity/performance with competitive prices," said Dileep Nadimpalli, senior market analyst-storage, IDC India.

Gaurav Sharma, research manager-enterprise and IPDS said: "The increasing adoption and acceptance of flash storage on the back of dipping dollar per GB and expansion of third platform is expected to continue. With organisations now realising the benefits of flash, it's now a question of where and how rather than whether they need flash."

IDC India forecast that the external enterprise storage systems market is expected to grow in single digit in terms of compound annual growth rate for 2014-2019.

Major investments are expected from banking, communication and media, government and manufacturing verticals.