The Compliance Push
Compliance conformation became mainstream. The need to store information for long periods of time and then retrieve it at a short notice, while adhering to regulations gave an impetus to compliance in the storage market. Almost all major storage vendors eyed this market as they considered it to have huge potential. Many Indian companies with business dealings in the US have been mandated to comply with international standards like the Sarbanes Oxley Act, Basel II, etc. 

Major storage vendors such as IBM, Sun, NetApp, EMC and HP have designed a well-defined strategy to tap this emerging market. Demand for compliance-related storage solutions is on the rise. The BFSI and telecom segments are expected to adopt newer compliance-based solutions in India. Special data format requiredments by corporate governance projects and the Reserve Bank of India are also pushing the adoption of compliance-based storage solutions in the country.

Enterprise Content Management also became imperative for enterprises, driven by the unprecedented growth in data, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured information, which grew by approximately 50% during the year. Over 80% enterprise information was unstructured, and a bulk was not managed. Regulations compelled organizations to store and manage data for specific periods of time giving rise to content management challenges. Various data theft scandals in the BPO industry also made BPO outfits reanalyze their data storage and security strategies. Given these content management challenges, enterprises needed to look at adopting well-defined and well-planned content management strategies in association with experts in the field.

Virtualizing Storage
Many enterprises adopted storage virtualization in FY 2005-06. Storage virtualization as a concept has existed for a long time, but has only now started finding takers in India on a large scale. Storage pooling, data migration and replication are some of the virtualization technologies commonly used in SAN. 

Storage virtualization allowed IT departments to easily deploy tiers of storage based on specific application requirements for performance, capacity and cost-effectiveness. Enterprises have been able to save storage costs by increasing the utilization of their storage disks, which is a significant increase at more than 50%. BFSI, telecom and the energy verticals led the way in adoption.

HP regains the #1 slot from EMC after a year. However, with Dell reselling substantial EMC products, the EMC-Dell combo will still remain on top. The surprise at #2 is Network Appliance, riding strong on NAS

ILM Provides Direction
Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) was another buzzword. Implementing ILM means a lot of effort in identifying and categorizing business data which is often the job of a specialist. Thus storage vendors generated revenues from this market by offering consultation services for implementing ILM.

Enterprises gradually adopted ILM strategies to protect corporate and intellectual property information.  Telecom, insurance, government institutes and banks were the main takers. ITC in Kolkata, Tata Elxsi for its visual computing lab in Bangalore, Tata Teleservices in Hyderabad and Mumbai, and Hutch across India are practicing different stages of ILM.

Services Money Spinner
With storage complexities on the rise, services built around storage became a hot area. While vendors like HP and IBM who are traditionally into services continued their momentum, pure storage vendors like NetApp and EMC followed the suit in FY 2005-06, and successfully entered the storage consulting and services arena. They provided services around storage consolidation to help customers align their architectures with business requirements.

Big enterprises went in for large-scale adoption of storage services in FY 2005-06, but SMBs are yet to follow suit. Large enterprises, mainly from the BFSI and telecom sector, drove the storage services due to the unpredictable growth of their businesses.

Secondary Growth
The secondary storage category such as tape and disk-based backup stayed in the background, as the  market grew by only 11%. However, the market reality is that Indian enterprises cannot write off secondary storage of tapes and drives, especially for backup and archival. FY 2005-06 recognized that rather than the disks wiping out the existence of tapes, the market would see a co-existence of both. 

While tape drives accounted for 59% of the revenues during FY 2005-06, tape automation products contributed the rest. However, it was the mid-range DLT/VS and low-end DDS/DAT drives that witnessed faster growth. The high-end LTO is yet to make  inroads into the Indian market. There were even less takers for proprietary technologies like Travan and AIT/VXA.

The triumvirate of HP, IBM and Quantum held center stage with Sun Microsystems joining the party, thanks to its StorageTek acquisition. HP had more than 40% of the market share followed by IBM and Quantum. Incidentally, for Quantum, India was its fastest growing market in Asia-Pacific.

Page(s)   1  2  3