External storage market in India falls 21% in Q1 2020: IDC

The external enterprise storage market in India has declined by a fifth in the first quarter of 2020 due to lower expenditure in professional services, manufacturing and telecommunications sectors, according to a study. 

The market declined $88 million between January and March, a report by data analytics firm International Data Corporation (IDC) showed. 

The entry- and mid-range storage segment declined in double digits in Q1, dragging the overall sector growth. However, high-end storage systems, such as mega data storage facilities, grew 3.7% due to increased investments from financial services companies and public sector enterprises, the report said.

Among individual companies, Round Rock, Texas-based Dell Technologies maintained its leadership position, with a 31.4% market share categorised by vendor revenue, followed by San Jose headquartered Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) at 15.9%, it said. 

Additionally, Japanese firm Hitachi and American technology company IBM witnessed robust growth in the segment, led by key orders from the government and banks, it showed.

“Businesses are revisiting their capex spending and will invest only if there is a pressing need, else (they) will opt for opex models. Organisations are moving to the public cloud so that they can avoid capital spending in these hard financial times,” Dileep Nadimpalli, research manager at IDC India, said.

The report said that businesses are expected to delay their information technology (IT) spending, and are likely to invest in automation, performance enhancement and cost optimisation due to cash flow issues. 

While the flash storage segment -- an array of regular storage devices -- made up 37.6% of the overall external storage systems, the report expects businesses to migrate to newer technologies such as non-volatile memory express, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to access and store the data.

In a separate report released on Monday, IDC said that India’s software market is expected to grow 3.8% year-on-year in 2020 as enterprises reassess their IT spends during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In another report, IDC said that it expects 64% of organisations in India to increase their demand for cloud computing services and 56% are likely to seek cloud softwares.