External storage market sees growth, IDC

International Data Corporation’s  (IDC) recent Asia/Pacific Quarterly Enterprise Storage Tracker, Q3 2014, showed a double-digit quarter-on-quarter growth (in vendor revenue) and stood at US$61.97 mn, though year-on-year was a de-growth in the Indian external storage market.

Factors contributing to the sudden upsurge in Q3 2014 are some large multi-million dollar deals, business favouring policies from the government and large pending technology refreshes. Though increased acceptability of cloud and need of infrastructure optimization across organizations are posing hiccups to the traditional storage market growth.

Flash storage is gaining foothold in Indian organizations, especially in verticals like Communication & Media, Manufacturing, IT/BPO and Banking. Software-defined storage is also slowly gaining traction with majority of the OEMs gearing up with solution-based approach to cater to this demand.

According to Dileep Nadimpalli, senior market analyst, Storage, “Significant growth of both structured and unstructured data is seen due to various factors like increased acceptance of third platform, compliance, regulatory and other business needs, and that is driving the need for storage like never before.”

However, EMC continued to lead the market, but its share dropped to 29% from 31% in Q3 2014 (quarter-on-quarter), whereas IBM displaced HP this quarter with a 24% market share. IBM posted a significant growth this quarter due to some large deals which helped them elevate to the second spot from their fifth spot in Q2 2014.