Data centre infrastructure hardware enterprise spending in India is on pace to total US$2.7 billion in 2018, a 2.6 per cent increase from 2017, according to Gartner. While hardware spending is set to grow moderately in 2018, enterprise spending on data centre infrastructure software will rise to US$3.6 billion in 2018, a 10 per cent year-over-year increase.
“Digital business initiatives are forcing infrastructure and operations leaders in India to adopt a hybrid IT infrastructure model that can deliver reliable, innovative and cost-effective solutions to the business in a timely manner. This positions cloud computing as a critical component of the hybrid model,” said Santhosh Rao, Research Director, Gartner.
In terms of data centre infrastructure hardware spending, end-user spending on networking equipment is expected to grow in 2018 as organisations modernise their local area network (LAN) and wide area network (WAN) infrastructure to support digital business needs. In contrast, on-premises server and storage spending will decline marginally as a result of public cloud migration.
“Technologies such as software-defined data centres are helping businesses optimise their existing resources, and as a result reducing overall spend on compute and storage resources,” added Rao.
Spending on IaaS and SaaS is increasing in 2018
Most organisations today have a cloud-first strategy, and new business applications are most likely to be developed and hosted using public cloud services. In addition, the availability of hyperscale data centers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure in India, as well as local providers ramping up to provide public cloud services, have become compelling reasons for Indian organisations to move toward infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Spending on IaaS in India is set to reach US$1 billion in 2018, up 45.5 per cent year over year.
Another notable trend is an increase in the number of migrations of on-premises office suites to software as a service-based offerings, such as Google G suite and Microsoft Office 365. Indian businesses are expected to spend close to US$275 million on cloud office suites in 2018, a 37 per cent increase year-over-year.
“While overall end-user spending on servers in India is expected to decline slightly, the hyperconverged integrated system (HCIS) segment of the server market is expected to grow further. HCIS witnessed wide-scale adoption in 2017 thanks to its operational simplicity. The momentum is expected to continue in 2018 with companies migrating their business-critical workloads to HCIS,” said Rao.
