Mobility-driven content to drive storage trends

BANGALORE, INDIA: Mobility is driving the need, creation and consumption of content which is growing at an alarming rate, signaling the storage vendors to prepare for an onslaught of future storage requirements.

Mobility has reached consumer level big time and we are witnessing a mobile revolution. Smartphones are substituting PCs and tablets are replacing laptops. IDC and Gartner predict that by 2015, two-thirds of the computing devices will be smartphones and media tablets.

This growth in mobility is driving newer ways of content creation and consumption which will only increase with time. The global mobile data traffic growth in 2011 was 133 per cent, says Cisco, and this rate has been more than doubling for the fourth year in a row.

Cisco predicts that the global mobile data traffic will exceed 6.3 exabytes per month by 2015. Out of this, 27 per cent of the traffic will be from smartphones.

The popularity of mobile web will catapult, especially with the marketers. Analysts say that companies will spend more than $56 billion on mobile web marketing. Marketing content initiatives will gain traction as it will be much easier and more ubiquitous to access and engage prospects, both B2B and B2C. In years to come, mobile web access will surpass stationary web access.

Indian telecos are pushing their 3G services to the consumers and in order to increase the 3G usage, they have drastically slashed the 3G rates bringing it almost at par with 2G's. A few telcos have also launched 4G services, and together, 3G and 4G will push the usage of the Internet services on mobile devices. This will lead to another explosion of content.

Enterprises will use mobility to improve service levels, offer higher flexibility to the employees in terms of resource management, mobile disbursement of cash, scanning of barcodes, and customer profiling, among many other things.

According to IDC, DHL Singapore made 20 percent savings by mobile device consolidation and service management. Citibank issued tablets to its field staff to shorten the loan closing process and increase the wallet share, while its board of directors got tablets to help them in faster decision making. Every such transaction translates into more content passing through mobile devices.

Social content will become huge on mobiles and tablets. What we see today is just the tip of the iceberg. Indian parents are becoming more open to allowing their children to have mobile phones and tablets which will further push the creation and consumption of content, a lot of which will be educational.

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Within this growing mobile content, the trend that points to more storage needs is the video traffic. In Cisco's analysis, 66 per cent of the 6.3 exabytes mobile traffic per month will be video.

Video content is expected to drive high-volume consumption to the tune of gigabytes. Mobile video traffic grew by more than 52 per cent by end of 2011, according to Cisco. Mobile gaming sites, video-sharing sites for both businesses and consumers like YouTube.com and video healthcare applications will form a bulk of this video content.

Video content will drive gigabyte consumption and demand at two ends of the spectrum: where the data initially resides or is hosted, and where it is ultimately stored. Initially, content is hosted on data centre servers (bulk storage), and it is believed this will continue to grow both in public and private clouds.

Ultimately, this data may have various destinations, including centralized home data repositories, among them: NAS boxes, gaming consoles or other edge devices, such as a DVR.

Trends also indicate broadband speed, both wired and wireless, will continue to increase, and availability will expand throughout the decade. And in a country like India where broadband penetration is less than five percent, potential for broadband growth is enormous.

Combine this with the lowering prices of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, increasing use of tablets and laptops in education, increasing growth of mobile subscriptions in rural India, development of newer content for mobile consumption...and you have a perfect recipe for mobile content explosion, both at the consumer and organizational levels.

When one talks of content, storage can't be far behind. In fact, the two go hand in hand - one without the other can't exist. Mobility is giving rise to a greater content need, generation and consumption, which implies a higher demand for storage.

The need for storage is clear. As the ecosystem of mobility and content emerges and grows in India, organizations and storage companies will have to work together find the best fit system and application to lead and accommodate this trend.

The author is country manager, India and SAARC at Seagate.