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Enterprises in locations that don’t usually register high in storage IT purchasing are making their moves up the industry charts.
New research from IDC released June 17 projects that the geographical region of Central Europe, Middle East and Africa (CEMA) will surpass Japan in total enterprise storage user spending in 2014.
By 2015, IDC said, Asia/Pacific–excluding Japan–will overtake Western Europe as the second largest storage-buying region, ranking only behind the United States.
“Some emerging regions–specifically, APeJ, the Middle East and Africa–will continue growing at high rates, fueled by long-term demands for storage and the creation of new storage infrastructures in fast-growing economies,” said Natalya Yezhkova, research director, Storage Systems at IDC. “Other emerging regions are expected to maintain growth rates that are comparable to those of more mature regions.”
As users find more efficient ways to store data–such as in new, more efficient systems and in cloud services–IDC believes that storage spending will grow at a more modest compound annual growth rate of 4.1 percent during the 2012-2017 forecast period, reaching $42.5 billion by 2017.
However, a slowdown in revenue growth is no indication that user demand for storage capacity will be diminished, the analytics firm said. Digital media and content, data protection and archiving will continue to be among the major drivers behind continuous demand for more storage capacity.
Other data points in the report include:
—Emerging regions (APeJ, CEMA and Latin America combined) will account for one-third of worldwide enterprise storage systems spending by 2017, up from 28 percent in 2012;
—Annual growth in storage capacity shipped is expected to remain moderate: 35 percent to 40 percent for external storage and 33 percent to 38 percent for internal storage; and
—Customers from emerging regions are less tied to legacy infrastructures and are more open to considering a broad range of solutions, including products from regional and local suppliers and cloud-service offerings.