The Indian enterprise-based external storage market, which consists of servers and data centres employed by corporations for their information infrastructure, is pegged to register a strong growth during the second half of 2009 on back of several large deals, expected to materialise during the last quarter of the calendar year 2009.
According to estimates by market research firm Gartner, the enterprise-based storage market (excluding external controller-based storage like pen drives) stood at $242 million in CY 2008, registering a growth of 17% over 2007. However, the global economic crisis which made corporations slash their IT spend led to a significant decline in the external storage demand also, with the market clocking overall revenues of $96 million during the first half of 2009.
However, Aman Munglani, principal research analyst, Gartner India said the second half of the year is expected to make up for the losses during the first half. ?There are several large deals across verticals, which are expected to be completed towards the last quarter of the year, which will perk up demand for external storage,? he said. Though he expects the year-on-year growth for this market in 2009 to be in low-single digits, Munglani said that sectors like banking and finance, telecom, manufacturing and government which are storage intensive will drive the market.
American technology giant IBM remained the market leader in this space according to both Gartner and IDC estimates. Sandeep Dutta, vice-president, storage, systems and technology group, IBM India and South Asia, said this is on back of the three game changing technologies implemented by the company. ?The numbers show that IBM is succeeding with its strategy of providing innovative storage solutions tailored for addressing specific business issues and helping address the challenges that customers are facing in the current economic environment,? he said.
While according to Gartner, IBM had a market share of 22.2% in the second quarter, followed by EMC (21%), Sun Microsystems (19%) and HP (13.1%), IDC figures put IBM?s market share at a 35.2% share in terms of factory revenue. The difference in the estimates of the two agencies is due to the fact that IDC takes into account outsourcing deals of the company as well which Gartner doesn?t.