India's external storage market declines 14.8% in Q3 FY2020: IDC

India’s external storage market witnessed a 14.8% year-on-year decline by vendor revenue to $79.9 million in Q3FY20, as per IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker report.

The decline was largely on account of a decrease in spending from professional services, government and manufacturing organisations during the quarter. The external storage systems market is expected to grow at a single-digit compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2019 and 2024.

IDC forecasts that external storage systems spending is expected to significantly drop YoY in CY2020 due to delayed demand across organisations attributing to Covid-19 impact but expects some recovery in CY2021.


“Emergence of new-age applications, multi-cloud, edge deployments, etc. are forcing organisations to revisit their enterprise IT architecture,” said Dileep Nadimpalli, research manager-enterprise infrastructure at IDC India. “To adapt to this changing IT landscape, enterprises need intelligent, hyper agile, scalable, resilient, and cloud-ready data platforms, which are flexible and easy to use."

All-Flash Arrays (AFA) contributed 39.2% to the overall external storage systems market in Q3 2020. Banking, telecommunications, and professional services verticals were the major contributors for AFA demand in Q3 2020.

Entry storage systems grew by 3.4% YoY backed by increased spending from the insurance vertical in Q3 2020. High-end and Midrange storage segments witnessed a steep double-digit YoY decline in Q3 2020.

“Covid-19 has brought forth multiple challenges for enterprises by forcing them to change their business and IT priorities to align to customers’ demands. We observed organisations considering OPEX-based deployments like never before for business continuity requirements and new projects, which is cannibalizing traditional storage demand,” said the report.

Among the major vendors, Dell Technologies remained the market leader with a 29% share by vendor revenue followed by NetApp at 14.8%