The data center market in India is growing at a rapid pace because of an unprecedented increase in digital evolution due to many companies willingly accepting the cloud as the way ahead. With virtualization and cloud solutions, managing the ever-increasing amount of data has turned easier. Both the technologies are helping to shape the market and data center demands. India is a promising land with a bunch of opportunities for data center growth in the country.
With the growing economic and technology transformation today, India’s data center market is witnessing a healthy growth. Indian data center infrastructure market currently valuing at $2.2 billion, is expected to touch $4.5 billion mark by 2018. It is predicted that India would move to be the second-largest market for datacenters in Asia Pacific by 2020, with investments reaching $7 billion. Even on the global level, the current macro trends driving the growth of data, and in turn the data center industry, more or less remain same – proliferation of tablets and smartphones, coupled with the content required satisfying the seemingly insatiable end users. Billions of dollars are spent on data center infrastructure in order to meet the growing demands of businesses and their customers.
“The massive volume of digital content produced has amplified the demand for host data centers required to run critical – sensitive information. Subsequently, data recovery has also picked up stride leading to more and more businesses reciprocating to the inclusion of data centers in their IT infrastructure”, excerpts Ramanan C, Director – Cloud Networking, India Sub-continent, Citrix.
Some potential trends in the data center market include the emergence of hybrid cloud wherein customers store workloads on private and public cloud. This has aided them to avail benefits such as lower TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), enhanced control and security through private cloud and ease of management through public.
Data Center market in India
The data center market in India is growing at a rapid pace because of an unprecedented increase in digital evolution due to many companies willingly accepting the cloud as the way ahead. With virtualization and cloud solutions, managing the ever-increasing amount of data has turned easier. Both the technologies are helping to shape the market and data center demands. According to Seema Ambastha, Senior Vice President – India & Global Business at Netmagic India is a promising land with a bunch of opportunities for data center growth in the country. And the great hike in startup firms in India, in addition to demand from different verticals, clearly indicates that the data center market will ascend further.
Data Center (DC) market in India is poised to touch $4.5 billion mark by 2018, with an exponential growth from the current valuation of $2.2 billion. Owing to multiple factors like growth in cloud adoption and the data processing needs posed by enterprises across industry verticals, the market is predicted to reach a $7 billion point, with a growth rate of 23 % by 2020. Dependence of organisations on data and their bend towards optimising business processes proves to be a significant contributor to the growth while state initiatives like Digital India beef up the demand by multiple folds. “India is a promising land with bountiful opportunities for data center growth in the country. Additionally, the great hike in startup firms in India, in addition to demand from different verticals, clearly indicates that the data center market will ascend”, opines George Chacko, Principal Systems Engineer & Lead Technical Consultant, Brocade India.
With data centers the lines between hardware and software have been blurred, these are very closely interlinked choices customers make when moving to a data enter. If you have a line of business in any of the enterprise platforms like SAP, Oracle, Microsoft products or technology areas like networking, storage, you will be able to play a pivotal role in working with your end customer as they make choices of data enter solutions & services. There is definitely a learning curve, most data enter use virtual alliance team that help partners leverage the sales & tech capabilities of the firm enabling them to have tech deep dive conversations with their customers.
Contributing Verticals for booming growth of DC market
The boom in the data center market is a result of demand pooled from enterprises across verticals like BFSI, IOT Telecom, E- Commerce, Manufacturing(majorly around ERP on cloud), Education, Health Care. Organizations today are inclined towards internal and external operational efficiency with optimized costs. The demands resonate with the solutions offered by key technology trends of the day, like cloud and virtualization which ride on data centers. Major industry verticals such as BFSI, Ecommerce, Telecom, IT/ITeS, and Manufacturing have contributed to the growth of market. To conclude, all the industry verticals, which are currently experiencing a technology shift for optimal performances at highly economical costs, cloud and data center outsourcing are the way out. They are no more options to choose from but are the main stream today and thus causing the upswing in the market.
Factors influencing DC growth
We see tremendous opportunity in this space and right now we are growing faster than the market. Data centers are an important part of infrastructure and there are several sectors spurring this growth –
- Our Government, who is hugely focused towards growth and allowing the private sectors to drive the economic growth in the country. Digital India, Startup India, Stand Up India, adoption of JAM (Janardhan, AADHAR, Mobile), and the roll out of the national optic fiber network for the Digital India initiative will rub off positively on the data center business in India.
- Newer and emerging technologies like Big Data, Analytics, Software-Defined Everything and Internet of Things (IoT) have led to accelerating demand of data center consolidation and virtualization.
- Growing e-commerce businesses, start-ups and large enterprises alike expect Data Center companies like Netmagic to host their IT infrastructure so that a company use whatever is needed (like real-estate, connectivity, IT systems, etc.) on a subscription basis. Also, more and more companies are becoming aware of disaster recovery, resulting in them approaching data centers.
- Increased demand of global companies to have their Data Centers (DCs) in India to operating their corporate offices in India, besides having their DC in their HQ. Hence, there is an increased demand in data center business in providing the IT security or support infrastructure at the back-end to ensure their operations run successfully in India.
- Deeper penetration of Internet across the country with proliferation of 3G and 4G.
Technologies influencing Indian DC market in 2017
Cloud, IoT, Big Data/Analytics are key growth drivers for data center business in India. In fact, every twenty-four hours 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is generated. Besides, it would be interesting to note that 90% of worlds data has been created in the last two years. Sridhar Pinnapureddy, Founder and CEO, CtrlS Data center opines, “Additionally, with IoT millions of devices shall be connected and combined with data analytics, leading to humungous amount of data generation – all of this requiring the support of data center infrastructure such as large storage, high and continuous availability supported by robust data security. This also offers a great opportunity for new players in the data center market.”
Though cloud technologies have caught the imagination of IT decision makers, most of them would adopt a hybrid strategy – while a part of the workload shall be deployed on cloud the rest is likely to be collocated in Data center in one form or the other. Data center shall also witness rapid adoption of SDx (Software Defined Networks, Storage etc), NFV ushering in the benefits such as quick device deployment – be it a firewall, network, storage or compute combined with rapid scaling of infrastructure. All of these eventually benefit our customers as they witness rapid progress from development to production (Go Live) helping them meet their business objectives. Green technologies shall also play a key role in shaping the future Data center to reduce the carbon footprint. Lastly, the current in-house Data center shall actively migrate to robust Data center such as Tier-4 Data center to ensure seamless availability of data and related infrastructure.
Role of Channel Partners in India in Data center market
Channel partners play a key role in the data center market in taking the services to the last mile , expanding the delivery & support coverage. With cloud services touted to be a major play riding on Data center in India, channel’s role has crossed over from sales enablers to IT transformation agents. Rohan Chandrahas , National Alliance Head, Pi DATA CENTER excerpts, “The level of readiness of channel in India is not at the point, where data center services are the mainstay of their business”. This is largely since channel is has been perennially been comfortable in being the feeder for physical IT infra requirements for their customer. They are yet to take a holistic view of IT as customer’s business enabler. , understand its IT footprint and having conversations that enable them to see both short term & long term aspects of customer engagement. Saying so, we are witness to some significant change in mindset of a section of channel fraternity in India, where they have have been the flag bearers of this strategic shift in positioning of channel and being ready to graduate to the next level and take their business strategy transformation challenge head on. We as data center and cloud OEMs, own a bigger responsibility to enable this transformation. Agreeing to this, Ravi Raj, Brand Head, Director Sales & Support at NETRACK says, “Partners in India will continue to play a key role in the growth of the data center market. As IT infrastructures are growing across the country, companies are now more dependent on their channel partners to deliver the best of the products and solutions. With the latest technologies, partners need to upgrade themselves. Most of the partners keep themselves updated and this makes them well-prepared to face the challenges.”
We believe that every channel partner has good business skills and understanding the requirements of their respective markets. But these skills will not be effective enough if a partner does not have a good understanding of data center components. Anil Sethi, Director & General Manager, Channels, Dell EMC has shares his views. He says, “In order to be specialists in the data center business, Dell EMC offers partners training and enablement programs so channel partners can learn industry best practices for the data center business.
Future hold for DC market
Data center will continue to play the role of a key enabler for technologies such as cloud, IoT, Analytics. This will trigger adoption of contemporary technologies by Data center to address the availability, security and growing storage needs of businesses. At the end, it can be said that the future is going to unveil a great scope and opportunity for the market. This is very much predicted and stands as no surprise. Investments are flowing in to India for the potential the nation carries as a market is tremendous.
By Satinder kaur
skaur@smechannels.com
