India: A $2 Billion Data Center Market

By Ben Sullivan

Latest estimates from Gartner put the Indian data center market at $2 billion (£1.3bn) by 2016, a 5.2 percent increase from this year.

This is thanks to a massive push toward cloud and IaaS workloads from small and medium businesses in the subcontinent, boosting spend on cloud storage.

Servers

“Within the Indian IT infrastructure market, server revenue is forecast to reach $698 million (£460m) in 2016, an increase of 5.3 percent over 2015. Enterprise networking will continue to be the biggest segment with revenue expected to touch $963 million (£635m) in 2016,” said Aman Munglani, research director at Gartner.

“This segment will also be the fastest growing market, as spending is forecast to increase 5.9 percent in 2016. With increased focus on mobility and big data activities in India, software defined networking has the highest adoption rate amongst Indian enterprises.”

The storage market alone is set to hit $307 million (£202m) in 2016, a three percent hike from 2015. Storage modernization and consolidation, backup and recovery, and disaster recovery are some of the key drivers to this market, said Gartner, and they are likely to remain relevant drivers over the forecast period through 2019.

Last month, Gartner said India will witness an “explosive” growth of IaaS and SaaS, with spending on cloud services in India to hit $1.9 billion by 2019.

Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and IBM‘s plans to open data centers and cloud regions in India look like they will pay off as public cloud services revenue in the country is set to hit $731 million (£477m) by the end of this year.

This figure, according to Gartner, is a jump of $176 million (£115m) over 2014’s revenue, and is driven by high growth rates in Infrastructure-as-a-Service products, Software-as-a-Service offerings, and cloud security services.

“The explosive growth of IaaS and SaaS in the India market is an indication that enterprises in India are moving away from building their own on premises infrastructure, as well as migrating from the traditional software licensing model, to a SaaS model served up by cloud providers,” reckoned Sid Nag, a research director at Gartner.