India’s external storage market reached $280 million by end of March 2017 telecommunications and banking being the major growth verticals.

Multimillion-dollar deal in telecommunication vertical drove this growth in the external storage market. Banking, telecom, professional services, manufacturing and government continued to be the key contributors in Q1 2017. In addition to the major verticals, significant growth is witnessed in verticals such as Securities, Transportation and Insurance during this period. This led to India’s external storage market witness a growth of 13.8 percent year on year(YoY) and stood at $ 74.6 million in Q1 2017.


High-end storage segment witnessed a strong YoY growth in Q1 2017 due to large deployments from telecommunications, banking and government verticals. Entry-level storage saw a marginal growth while mid-range external storage saw a marginal YoY decline in market share during Q1 2017.

Witnessed significant uptake of All flash Arrays (AFA) among telecom, BFSI, IT/ITeS, government and manufacturing units in Q1 2017.Acceptance of AFA is increased as it offers better performance at an affordable price. Also, witnessed increased acceptance of Hybrid Flash arrays (HFA) as this offers both capacity and performance with a single array.

In Q2 significant spending from banking and telecommunication verticals drove incremental growth in the external storage market. Banking, professional services, telecommunications, manufacturing and government continue to be the key contributors in Q2 2017. Increased acceptance of third platform technologies are pushing organisations to deploy new age storage solutions to address dynamic storage demands. This led revenue touched $70 million in Q2.

High-end storage segment witnessed a high double-digit YoY growth in Q2 2017 due to large deployments from banking and telecommunication verticals. Mid-range storage and entry-level external storage segment saw a marginal de-growth YoY in Q2 2017.

Increased uptake of All Flash Arrays(AFA), Hyper converged infrastructure and Software defined Storage are the key technology trends witnessed in the market. In addition, all the global cloud providers and 3rd party datacenter players are investing heavily to tap the increased uptake of cloud solutions.

However, in Q3, India’s External Storage Market witnessed marginal 0.4 percent growth YoY (by vendor revenue) and stood at $66.4 million in Q3 2017 according to IDC’sQuarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker, Q3 2017. The growth was majorly driven by banking, professional services, manufacturing and government verticals in Q3 2017. Optimization drive for storage infrastructure across organizations stood out to be the leading reason for greater demand for hyper converged infrastructure, software defined storage and cloud technologies. In Q4 the market touched $64 million.

At the end of the fiscal Dell emerged as the market leader with a 26.1 percent market share by vendor revenue, however witnessed a YoY decline in Q3 2017. Hewlett Packard Enterprise gave tough competition to Dell Inc, narrowing the gap in terms of vendor revenue and stood at second position with 21.3%. IBM and HDS witnessed double-digit YoY decline while Huawei and NetApp saw a significant YoY growth in 2017.