According to TechSci Research, data storage market in India is projected to register a CAGR of more than 7% during 2016-2021, on account of continuing volumes surge of structured and unstructured data, increasing demand for high performance external drives and declining cost of data storage devices in the country. This signals great new opportunities for data storage companies in the country -
The storage and back-up market in India is up for a major growth boost. With increase in data storage capacity to store customer data becoming a necessity for organizations, enterprises are consequently increasing their IT expenditure in order to address the growing need for storage space. Additionally, growing e-commerce sector and increasing penetration of smartphones among urban and semi-urban population is projected to significantly increase data storage requirements in the country over the next five years. External drives which include hard disk drives, solid state drives and flash storage are the key revenue generators in India data storage market. Though ‘External Storage’ as a segment is expected to continue its dominance in the country’s data storage market, ‘Cloud Storage’ is expected to witness significantly higher growth in the coming years. BFSI, IT & telecom, education, government, defense, healthcare and retail sectors are some of the leading end user segments for data storage market in India.
Furthermore, technology shifts and the new emerging trends are increasing the amount of data generated every day. The sheer amount of data being generated is immense, which increases the demand for new secured storage solutions, especially to store the data being generated from multiple sources. Therefore, in order to meet the rising needs of the customers and to address this data deluge, organisations are looking at modernizing their IT infrastructure.
Storage & Back-up market in India
As per IDC’s latest Asia/Pacific Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker Q4 2018 release, India’s external storage market witnessed a growth of 8.8% YoY (by vendor revenue) and stood at USD 87.8 million in Q4 2018. According to statistics from MRC, the Global Data backup and Recovery Market accounted for $6.98 billion in 2017 and is expected to reach $18.21 billion by 2026 growing at a CAGR of 11.24% during the forecast period.
Businesses in India are seen embracing emerging technologies like never before and they are transforming their IT in order to derive greater insights from their data. As a result, these customers demand for solutions which can maximize their data capital while being agile, scalable and cost effective. Hence, the future storage market presents a gold mine of opportunity for companies to tap.
"We at Dell Technologies believe that the future of storage is hybrid and multi-cloud which will help the customers to succeed in their digital transformation journey by embracing IT transformation. Organisations which will undergo this critical IT transformation will have a competitive advantage over others." which is why our focus will be towards shifting the perception of buying storage based on technology to buying better business outcomes.
Amit Mehta
Director - Modern Data Centre, Dell Technologies
Moreover, it is also important for customers to shift from Cloud-first strategy to Data-first strategy, which will help them to understand their data better and therefore, enable them in choosing a right storage strategy for themselves,” asserts Amit Mehta, Director - Modern Data Centre, Dell Technologies.
"It is difficult for IT to keep up with these demands because they remain tied down administering, tuning, and supporting infrastructure. Therefore, enterprises need an intelligent data platform, which can deliver unmatched simplicity, availability, and performance for mission-critical applications, so they can focus on harnessing data to drive their business forward."
Rajesh Dhar
Senior Director, Hybrid IT, HPE India
Rajesh Dhar, Senior Director, Hybrid IT, HPE India believes that today’s businesses are seeking to bring new mission-critical applications to market, and support existing ones in order to accelerate speed of business, agility and innovation. Our recently introduced HPE Primera storage solution redefines mission-critical storage by delivering superior simplicity, availability, and performance. The new platform leverages HPE InfoSight, the industry’s most advanced AI platform for operations, to deliver significant breakthroughs, including 93% less time spent on managing storage, and the ability to predict and prevent issues, and accelerate application performance. As a result, this solution enables businesses to transition from delivering storage to unlocking business value with intelligent data,” he says.
"We believe that India’s growing appetite for data creation and consumption and demand for services related to data management will play a critical role in our growth story. This will result in product innovations that will specifically contribute to supporting requirements of new technologies."
Anupam Nagar
Senior Director - Channels and Alliance, Hitachi Vantara
Adding further on the demand part, Anupam Nagar, Senior Director - Channels and Alliance, Hitachi Vantara points out that increased storage demand from Government, Professional Services and BFSI drove the growth for the storage market in Q4 2018. “Technology refresh/capacity expansion, modernization initiatives and investments on emerging technologies drove the incremental growth. With storage, Flash Array systems witnessed the maximum growth. Furthermore, entry and mid-level storage systems are witnessing exponential growth,” he says.
"From leading production houses to cutting-edge autonomous vehicle engineering firms, organizations are turning to the latest networking technologies to attain the most cost-effective storage solutions. Customers will be able to utilize the latest generation networking infrastructure between their clients and storage arrays, thereby accelerating workflows and improving productivity."
Jim Simon
VP of Global Field & Channel Marketing – Quantum
To this Jim Simon, VP of Global Field & Channel Marketing – Quantum adds that our dependency on the new age technologies like biometric, EV, assisted car has exponentially increased the requirement for the storage devices to locally access or save it on cloud. The next couple of years are crucial for the industry where it is going to align itself to chart its path towards a data rich environment,” he cites.
Growth of storage in India
India had always been on a constant growth trajectory. However, over the last 3 to 4 years, the growth has accelerated even further and will continue to do so for the next 5 years. “The primary reasons for this growth are digital transformation of businesses, advent of 3rd platform technologies and rapid digitization of services. This is substantiated with statistics from IDC. In the FY year 2018, the global storage market increased by 7.4% y-o-y, while on the other hand, India storage market grew at 8.8% y-o-y, which is 1.4% higher than the global growth rate,” explains Anupam.
As per IDC, All Flash Arrays (AFA) that witnessed a significant YoY growth of 30.0% in Q4 2018 contributed 27.9% of the overall external storage market. Improved performance vs cost ratio for flash deployments is pushing organizations to consider All Flash Arrays (AFA). Similarly, Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) market is expected to grow over 4X in the next 5 years. MarketsAndMarkets predicts that HCI market size will grow from $4.1 billion in 2018 to $17.1 billion by 2023. Software Defined Storage market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 36.7% between 2016 – 2021, i.e. a growth in market size from $4.7 billion to $22.5 billion. “The growth of these solutions has an indirect impact on the growth of core storage market in India,” points out Anupam.
“We are seeing that the Indian external storage market has been witnessing an increase at a constant rate,” observes Amit. “This is majorly because of the increased investments being made by enterprises across sectors such as BFSI and government services. Continuous innovation enabled by data holds the key today to excel in this competitive environment. Organizations are constantly increasing their expenditure to undertake IT transformation and stay ahead of the competition. With this shift in place, we can expect that there will be an increase in the Indian storage market and it will be placed at a better position than the global storage market.”
Increased spending on storage from organization across verticals such as IT/ITeS, Professional Services, banking, manufacturing, telecommunications and government is thus contributing to the growth. In fact, per IDC, these sectors alone contributed to over 82% of overall market.
Jim states that over 50% of the data stored consists of videos or images. This is expected to continue to grow in the years ahead with advents in video surveillance, corporate video, analytics, media and entertainment, geospatial, and autonomous vehicles. “These, and many other verticals, all have in common the fact that they are generating substantial, record-breaking, amounts of video and rich media. The missions depend upon their data,” he says.
All these factors point to the very fact that India has emerged as an early adopter of technology. Therefore, data growth in India is equal to, or even surpasses, some of the other forward-looking countries.
Furthermore, the government’s Digital India push has led to an increase in the data being generated in the country, forcing the organisations to rapidly look at modernizing their IT infrastructure. The storage capabilities of businesses across verticals are being put to the test in order to derive value from this data.
“Although almost every sector has come under the purview of the Digital Transformation wave, however, the top three key sectors which are contributing the most to the growth of the storage industry include the Government, Professional Services and BSFI. This is mainly because of the continuous technology refresh/capacity expansion, modernization initiatives and investments by these sectors on emerging technologies,” asserts Amit.
As per Oracle’s recent study ‘Rediscovering trust in your data and security’, only 50% of companies in Asia Pacific (APAC) are confident of their data management capabilities. “Interestingly, Indian businesses have more confidence in their data management vis-à-vis their APAC peers,” shares Srikanth Doranadula, Senior Director, Systems Head Business - Oracle India. “India is one of those countries which are confident of their data and security.”
Oracle Exadata is the foundation for Oracle Autonomous Database, the world’s first self-driving database, and Oracle Cloud Applications. The recently launched Exadata Database Machine X8 features breakthrough hardware and software enhancements, as well as unique machine learning capabilities. It can run the most critical workloads for thousands of customers around the world and stands out as a key means for Oracle Database users to take the leap from on-premises data centers to the public cloud wherever they are ready.
A profitable business model for the Channel
The digital transformation of businesses, advent of 3rd platform technologies and rapid digitization of services has led to significant increase in creation and consumption of data. In fact, the demand for storage solutions will continue to rise for the next 5 years. In such a scenario, it provides a significant opportunity to channel partners to focus on developing a long-term business strategy that will enable them to primarily focus on storage solutions along with periphery solutions required to support workloads of enterprises.
With the storage industry growing and becoming a lucrative market for all technology vendors, and with partners being an integral part for any business, it is but evident to bring these partners on board so that they are prepared to make the most of this opportunity. This is becoming crucial for every channel oriented organization today.
“Our channel partners are an important part of our business; therefore, we put in a lot of efforts to bring them to speed. We have adopted a unique Channel Partner Programme, where we provide our partners the required training that will help them excel in their business. Moreover, according to our programme, we have categorized our partners into gold, platinum, titanium and titanium black, based on the revenue they generate, training and targets they achieve. The channel partner programme enables them to expand their product offerings and gain a higher share in the market,” says Amit.
Dell Technologies offers a comprehensive end-to-end storage portfolio to its partners and customers, which includes the right combination of scalability, efficiency, intelligence along with the integration of emerging technologies. The variety of storage products offered by Dell Technologies includes its flagship Dell EMC PowerMax storage array solution that is architected with end-to-end NVMe and a built-in, real-time machine learning engine. It also offers midrange storage solutions – Dell EMC Unity XT and SC Series – entry-level Dell EMC PowerVault storage arrays, Dell EMC Isilon and ECS file and object storage and comprehensive storage software along with services to suit almost every enterprise customer needs. Moreover, its hyper-converged infrastructure portfolio such as VxRail, enables its customers automates network setup and lifecycle management with SmartFabric Services, greatly accelerating deployment and simplifying operations and provide enterprise edge solutions with support for 2-node clusters.
“Hitachi Vantara will continue to innovate and deliver core data services, data infrastructure and content delivered “as-a-Service”. We are moving away from a “speeds and feeds” metric to focus on what really matters: business outcomes. Our partner ecosystem is critical to our success. As we look to broaden our ecosystem expertise and deepen our cloud, analytics, and IoT services and offerings, we will continue to expand our solution - capable partner ecosystem to accelerate co-creation and innovation and help our customers fully leverage their data to drive extraordinary outcomes,” contends Anupam.
“Quantum is in the midst of a top to bottom upgrade of our channel partner program, Quantum Alliance. We recently refreshed our channel partner portal to provide more sales tools in an easier to find manner; we rolled out syndication which allows Quantum channel partners to offer Quantum solutions on their own websites by simply linking to a special page on Quantum Alliance; we have increased our webinars and training programs—all of which are posted for on-demand viewing; and last but certainly not least, we are in the process of refreshing our campaign materials so that channel partners can quickly and easily generate new opportunities by leveraging proven campaigns developed by Quantum,” says Jim.
Quantum recently announced its VS-series appliances for the video surveillance and IoT markets. VS-series appliances run leading video management system (VMS) applications as well as applications that provide benefits such as access control. Being hyperconverged, they share the hardware thereby taking up less physical space in the data center and requiring less power and less cooling.
