By Sarosh Bana
Cloud Computing will evolve into a US$4.5 billion market in India by 2016, accounting for up to 35 percent of the country’s overall IT spend.
Driven by an increasingly interconnected world, the ‘digital era’ is transforming business and society. Digital Information is doubling every two years and by 2020 it will be 50 times the staggering 1.8 zettabytes (ZB) it measured globally in 2011. A ZB of storage capacity is equivalent to approximately 1,000 exabytes (EB), each exabyte equalling 1.07 billion gigabytes (GB).
This surge in Digital Information is creating unprecedented challenges for businesses, individuals and Governments to store, manage, secure and access it. Once a fraction of the entire IT spend and a back-end piece, storage is now vital in the expanding Digital Universe. Technologies of Cloud Computing and Big Data analytics that address the entire lifecycle of Digital Information hold the key today.
Digital Information in India too, is poised to explode 23-fold by 2020. Digital bits captured or generated each year expected to grow from 177 EB in 2012 to 2.9 ZB by 2020. The country’s storage market had been largely disk-based (part of server or PC) and worth US$97.82 million (calculated at Rs61.85 to a US dollar as on 12 December 2013) in 2002, but by 2012, it had grown to US$266 million and was network-based.
Cloud Computing is projected to evolve into a US$4.5 billion market by 2016, accounting for up to 35 percent of India’s overall IT spend, the private cloud market alone creating 100,000 jobs by 2015. This is being driven world-wide by proliferation of devices such as PCs and Smartphones, increased internet access within emerging markets, boost in data from surveillance cameras and smart meters, increasing machine-to-machine communication (M2M), falling costs of technology and digitisation of TV.
Bill Scannell, President for Global Sales & Customer Operations of the US’s EMC Corporation, says his company, a leader in the storage market in India and globally, sees immense business potential. “EMC in India leads the industry with a 25.5 percent market share and has been investing ahead of the curve to lead this transition,” says Scannell, who was in Mumbai recently to attend the EMC Forum 2013, the annual flagship event held by his Hopkinton, Massachusetts-based company in various cities around the world. READ MORE
