Indian IT storage market set for a boom

NEW DELHI: Increasing data as well as the need to maintain service levels and ensuring business continuity are driving India small and medium business (SMB) investment in

storage products and services. According to AMI forecasts, storage expenditures

among SMBs are expected to increase more than one and a half times in 2005 in

India. Online and offsite data storage solutions are gaining popularity among

India's SMBs and a significant number of them plan to deploy these solutions in

2005.






According to new findings by AMI-Partners, in 2004, India's PC-owning small and
medium businesses (SMBs) spent approximately $26.3 million on DAS storage,

while network storage spending amounted to $16.9 million.






Despite data security threats presented by viruses, malicious worms and
trojans, India SMBs are rapidly adopting these more sophisticated enterprise software

applications.






AMI research shows that a third of medium businesses (MBs) believe increases in
required storage capacity are generated by growth in the number of users, while

more than one in four cite the expanding network of business partners with whom

they conduct individual electronic transactions. This is true of small

businesses (SBs) also, with nearly one fifth of PC-owning SBs citing expanding

storage requirements due to increases in the number of network users and

electronic transactions with business partners.






Moreover, Indian SMBs are realizing the importance of customer relationship
management, and are gradually adopting enterprise CRM applications to provide

better customer service. Currently, almost five percent of small and medium businesses

have adopted CRM software, and an additional 15 percent of businesses

anticipate investing in CRM solutions this year. Spending on enterprise-level

applications such as ERP, whose usage is still at an embryonic stage, is

expected to surge in the next few years.






According to the findings, the increasing focus on security is also leading
SMBs to invest in data backup and disaster recovery solutions. Twenty-nine

percent of MBs and 15 percent of SBs attribute their increased storage

requirements to the need to create data back-up.






New York-based AMI-Partners is a consulting firm that specializes in IT,
Internet, telecommunications and business services market intelligence.

- CyberMedia News