NetApp sees storage market explosion in India

 Propelled by India’s emergence  as a data-driven economy, NetApp, the $6.324-billion global major in storage and data management software, systems, and services is betting big on India.

In an interaction with Deccan Herald, NetApp India and  SAARC president Anil Valluri said the country is likely to witness dramatic explosion in data generation backed by social, mobile, analytics and cloud services (SMAC), internet of things (IoT), Digital India, etc. and exponential growth in telecom, healthcare, and educational sectors.

“NetApp sits at the heart of this tech transformation fuelled by industry trends, making storage one of the single-most important investments organisations have to make to ensure that their data is safe, and easily accessible from anywhere, anytime,” said Valluri.
He said the company expects BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance), government, manufacturing, SMB (small and medium businesses), healthcare, and oil and gas sectors to generate huge opportunities in the storage space.

“In the past two years alone, the world has generated 90 per cent of the data in existence today. Data production will be 44 times greater in 2020 than it was in 2009.  While individuals create 70 per cent of all data, the enterprises store 80 per cent of them,” he said.

Volume of data

Valluri said large and small companies alike are experiencing an increase in the volume of data coming into the organisation and are eager to leverage the insights so generated to make smarter, more informed business decisions.

When asked about the growth of the hybrid-flash array market ( a combination of flash memory and disk drive memory), he said customers are very conscious of their spend. “Globally, customers are very careful in their spend on storage because they want more value with less money. Hybrid gives customers the opportunity to select additional storage when required, and at attractive pricing,” he said.

NetApp Data Fabric is a technology architecture for hybrid cloud as it enables enterprises to control, integrate, move, and consistently manage their data across the hybrid cloud of their choice.

According to IDC, in 2014, the hybrid-flash array market reached $10 billion, while the all-flash array market size was at $1.3 billion. Flash memory, as well its software, is very expensive.

As per IDC data, along with the top three legacy storage vendors EMC, NetApp, and IBM, Hitachi Data Systems and Hewlett-Packard too lost market share last year. While wares from Nimble, Pure Storage, Nutanix and others have made real inroads.

California based ‘business recovery cloud’ service provider Axcient succeeded as it enables businesses to get their systems and applications up and run fast in case their main computer systems go down due to sudden events.

According to IDC’s forecast, revenue from storage within the overall Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market is expected to increase at a 37.4 per cent CAGR through 2018, reaching $12.1 billion.

The on-premise storage market is only expected to increase at a 2.6 per cent CAGR during that period.“We also note that while storage revenue for the public cloud market only accounts for 19 per cent of the on-premise storage market, this forecasts implies it will increase to 41 per cent by 2018,” states the report.