India IT infra spending to reach $2.3 bn by 2014: Gartner

The Indian IT infrastructure market, comprising of server, storage and networking equipment, will total $2.1 billion in 2013, growing 9.7 percent compared to 2012, according to Gartner, Inc.

Gartner analysts are providing the latest outlook on the Indian data center market during the Gartner Infrastructure, Operations and Data Center Summit, which is taking place here through May 14th.

"Despite global economic challenges, India provides strong growth opportunities across segments including infrastructure. Infrastructure alone is expected to surpass $2.9 billion in 2017," said Naveen Mishra, research director at Gartner."The Nexus of Forces- big data, cloud, social and mobility- are finding real-time business driven use cases which is bringing a paradigm shift in the way IT is delivering business impact and hence, changing the role of an Indian CIO."

The Indian IT infrastructure market is driven by hardware refresh, optimization and consolidation efforts. New data centre build out, primarily driven by service providers, is providing added impetus to this market. The server market accounts for the biggest chunk of the market totaling 753 million in 2013 and forecast to total $962.3 million in 2017. Increased uptake of x86 based technologies, coupled with continued investment in virtualization, will drive server growth. Virtualization is extending beyond servers and is setting the stage for private cloud adoption in many of the leading organizations.

External controller-based storage is the fastest growing segment with revenue growing from $374.2 million in 2013 to $702.3 million in 2017. While managing the storage demands is one of the biggest problems faced by Indian users, approaches such as tiered storage are helping to optimize storage needs. Integrating software driven intelligence in the storage market is another phenomenon which is gaining traction in India.

"New data center implementations to meet server consolidation and virtualization needs, combined with campus upgrades, and growing adoption of multimedia applications and mobility, are driving the networking market. Future demand and dynamics of the market will also be heavily influenced by these trends as they intensify, and other disruptive technologies like cloud, social and big data take center stage," said Naresh Singh, principal research analyst at Gartner.