Gartner analysts are providing the latest trends shaping the future of the data center market during the fourth annual Gartner Infrastructure, Operations and Data Center Summit, which is taking place here through Tuesday at the Hotel Renaissance, Mumbai.

“Indian IT infrastructure is poised to be a $2.29 billion market by 2018,” said Naveen Mishra, research director at Gartner. “The Indian infrastructure market will witness investments primarily fuelled by data center modernization initiatives to drive uninterrupted and better quality of service.”

Indian enterprises will focus on creating integrated data centers for optimizing existing IT assets and delivering non-stop IT services to business. This will drive greater emphasis on public cloud, Devops and software defined networking.

Within the Indian IT infrastructure market, server revenue is forecast to reach $658 million in 2015, a decline of 4.7 percent from 2014 (see Table 1). The server market is expected to return to positive growth in 2016 when revenue is forecast to total $698 million.

Enterprise networking is the biggest segment with revenue expected to touch US$944 million in 2015. With increased focus on mobility and big data activities in India, software defined networking is getting discussed and adopted amongst Indian enterprises.

The storage market is on pace to reach $426 million this year, a 7 percent increase from last year. Storage modernization and consolidation, backup and recovery, and disaster recovery are some of the key drivers to this market, and they are likely to remain relevant drivers over the forecast period through 2018.