Indian IT storage market set for a boom

Increasing data as well as the need to maintain service levels and ensuring
business continuity are driving India small and medium business (SMB) investment
in storage products and services. According to AMI forecasts, storage
expenditures among SMBs are expected to increase more than one and a half times
in 2005 in

India.

Online and offsite data storage solutions are gaining popularity among India's
SMBs and a significant number of them plan to deploy these solutions in 2005.
According to new findings by AMI-Partners, in 2004, India's PC-owning SMBs
spent approximately $26.3 million on DAS storage, while network storage spending
amounted to $16.9 million.

Despite data security, threats presented by viruses, malicious worms and
trojans, India SMBs are rapidly adopting these more sophisticated enterprise
software applications. AMI research shows that a third of medium businesses (MBs)
believe increases in required storage capacity are generated by growth in the
number of users, while more than one in four cite the expanding network of
business partners with whom they conduct individual electronic transactions.

This
is true of small businesses (SBs) also, with nearly one fifth of PC-owning SBs
citing expanding storage requirements due to increase in the number of network
users and electronic transactions with business partners. Moreover, Indian SMBs
are realizing the importance of customer relationship management, and are
gradually adopting enterprise CRM applications to provide better customer
service.

Currently, almost five percent of small and medium businesses have adopted
CRM software, and an additional 15% of businesses anticipate investing in CRM
solutions this year. Spending on enterprise-level applications such as ERP,
whose usage is still at an embryonic stage, is expected to surge in the next few
years.

According to the findings, the increasing focus on security is also leading
SMBs to invest in data backup and disaster recovery solutions. 29% of MBs and
15% of SBs attribute their increased storage requirements to the need to create
data back-up.

New York-based AMI-Partners is a consulting firm that specializes in IT,
Internet, telecommunications and business services market intelligence.

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