External storage market up 16% in Q2 due to demand for emerging technologies: IDC

The external storage market in India has grown 16.4% year-over-year by vendor revenue to $101.8 million in the second quarter of the financial year 2019-20 compared to the corresponding quarter of the previous financial year, a new study has found. 

The investments in the external storage market were supported by infrastructure modernisation and technology upgradation, said a statement from International Data Corporation (IDC).

The IDC study, Asia/Pacific Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker, attributed the growth to investments from professional services and banking organisations. 

Dell Technologies continued to be the leader with a 29.6% market share. The company’s growth was driven by banking, professional services and manufacturing.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise followed Dell with a 15.4% market share.

High-end storage segment, which refers to the most advanced tier of storage solutions, increased 69.6% year-on-year due to its increasing demand from the financial services, government, media and telecommunications sectors, the study found.

All-Flash Arrays (AFA), or solid-state disk storage systems operating on flash memory, alone form 30% of the overall external storage systems market.

Demand from the banking, telecommunications and manufacturing verticals contributed to the growth of the AFA segment within the external storage ecosystem.

"Increasing demand from third platform technologies, data localisation and surveillance, coupled with adoption of new-age technologies such as IoT (internet of things), RPA (robotic process automation), AI (artificial intelligence), and blockchain will drive the storage market in the near future," said Dileep Nadimpalli, research manager, enterprise infrastructure, IDC India. 

The increasing digital transformation initiatives have pushed the need for innovative storage technologies to address growing storage requirements, the statement said.

IDC also said growth in storage solutions would be driven by the need to modernise digital infrastructure to adapt to emerging technologies.

Recent IDC studies

The server market in India registered a YoY decline in revenue of 16.2% in the first quarter of 2019. Revenues for the x86 server market declined while those for the non-x86 servers increased.

Another study by IDC found that costs and lack of skilled workers have prevented enterprises from adopting artificial intelligence solutions. The study also found that only 25% of organisations have adopted an enterprise-wide AI strategy. 

The networking market in India grew by almost 34% in the fourth quarter of the financial year 2018-19. IDC attributed the growth in the networking market to increased investments from enterprises and service provider deployments.