India’s external storage market jumps again – but change is on the horizon

India continues to be a thriving IT hub with significant investments being placed in hardware.

According to IDC, vendor revenue for India's external storage market alone underwent a growth of 21.1 percent year over year in the second quarter of this year, reaching US$84.7 million.

IDC says this growth was largely pushed by increased demand from professional services, which when combined with banking, manufacturing, telecommunications, and government industries made up for almost 80 percent of the total external storage market.

"Increased acceptance of emerging technologies and DX acceleration across organizations led to investments on new age external storage hardware technologies and evaluation of storage optimizing solutions such as Software defined storage," says IDC India enterprise infrastructure research manager Dileep Nadimpalli.

Deep within the market, the all hard disk drive segment continued its decline, while the All flash array and hybrid flash array segment saw huge growth. Across industries, there was an increased consumption of solid-state drives (SSD) over hard disk drives (HDD) for better performance of different workloads.

The market is being led by the midrange external storage segment, making up for more than 60 percent of the total Q2 2018 market. Meanwhile, the high-end storage segment actually declined. IDC says the availability of enterprise-class features in midrange storage is part of the industry's surge.

"IT departments are facing challenges in accommodating the LOB demands on scalability and agility for faster time to market and better customer experience. Organizations are creating more 'data value' and 'monetization' means by leveraging new architectures/storage solutions," says IDC India enterprise director Ranganath Sadasiva.

In terms of the vendors with the biggest stakes of the pie, Dell continued its reign at the top with a 26.5 percent market share, trailed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise on 21.5 percent.

And finally when it comes to the future, IDC has forecast the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of the external storage systems market to continue its amplification through to 2022 but at a slower rate, likely to be a single digit number.