The advent of big data analytics, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and the availability of a large number of multi-tiered enterprise applications are forcing customers to migrate or upgrade their existing storage architectures and capacities.

IDC sees large and very large businesses continuing to fuel the growth but SMBs (especially mid-size ones) are also growing in terms of their relative contribution to the storage market. Manufacturing is one of the verticals that saw a lot of investments from the SMBs in this quarter.

Flash technology is getting increased focus from the market due to recent advancements in technology that have made the systems more affordable with better I/O speeds compared to HDD's.

Gaurav Sharma, Research Manager – Enterprise, IDC India, says, "Regulatory and compliance requirements are still driving the spend from banking vertical. However, the larger portion of opportunities from the large banks are still on hold awaiting a positive post election scenario. The media vertical is also fast gaining ground with large media houses and television channels continuing their digitization drive with innovative solutions like video on demand (VOD)."

EMC continued to lead the market with a share of 33% , followed by IBM with a share of 22% and NetApp and HP with a share of 13% and 9% respectively. Companies of all sizes are increasingly focused on the specific technology areas (within storage) ensuring value derived is in line with the needs and expectations of the business.

"The market is moving towards technologies like de-duplication and compression along with addition of traditional storage capacities," adds Sharma.

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