India SMB server market to exceed $500M by 2017

BANGALORE, INDIA: Small and medium businesses (SMBs, companies with fewer than 999 employees) play a significant role in driving the all-India server demand.

The current India SMB server market amounts to approximately $300M and is expected to grow to over $500M by 2017. These are some of the key highlights of AMI's soon to be published "2013 India SMB Server and Storage Study".

India SMBs operating in the manufacturing and IT/ITeS space continue to be on the watch list of major server vendors as they are expected to fuel the demand for servers.

Verticals such as manufacturing are striving for automation and to increase productivity across the entire value chain. Applications such as CRM and ERP are also being adopted by India SMBs.

In the face of the global slowdown, the focus is now increasingly on optimum resource utilization. Consequently, the need for automation and productivity enhancements has boosted SMB's IT needs.

Within India SMBs, the technology adoption pattern is diverse. Pratik Gupta, Associate at AMI-Partners India said, "Smaller SMBs are generally laggards in terms of technology adoption. They utilize servers for basic tasks such as file/print sharing and email.

"On the other hand, larger SMBs are early technology adopters. They utilize servers for advanced line of business applications such as CRM, ERP and analytics. Furthermore, these businesses have gradually started adopting virtualization," added he.

Relatively small India SMBs often do not have a formal IT team in place. Many of their IT purchases and decisions are ad-hoc in nature.

For information pertaining to IT and the eventual purchase, these SMBs rely heavily on peer group discussions, online searches and interactive platforms such as blogs and review platforms.

However, channel partners, who act as the last mile in the distribution chain, play a crucial role in the decision making process of smaller India SMBs. These channel partners act as an important source of information SMBs - right from pricing related information to offering suggestions on which brands to shortlist and buy.

Continuous training and certification programs are being actively used by vendors to ensure partner efficiency and capability for high-end servers and emerging technologies such as cloud computing and virtualization.