India IT infrastructure spending to reach $1.9 bn in 2014

The Indian IT infrastructure market, comprising server, storage and networking equipment, will total $1.9 billion in 2014, a 4 per cent increase from 2013, according to a study by Gartner.

''The global IT infrastructure investment is expected to be almost flat in 2014 and will be primarily driven by hyper scale and data centre modernisation initiatives. In the global landscape, India is a promising IT Infrastructure market through 2017,'' said Mike Harris, research group vice president at Gartner.

''Indian IT infrastructure is poised to be a $2.35 billion market by 2017. After sluggish market conditions in 2013, the Indian infrastructure market will witness investments primarily fuelled by key IT initiatives that include mobility, cloud and big data,'' said Naveen Mishra, research director at Gartner.

Indian businesses will be focusing on building intelligent data centres that focus on optimising existing hardware assets by using additional software capabilities, Grtner said, adding, this will drive increased attention on newer trends such as public cloud, and integrated systems.

Within the Indian IT infrastructure market, server revenue is forecast to reach $663 million in 2014, a 1 per cent decline from 2013. The server market is expected to return to positive growth in 2015 when revenue is forecast to total $697 million.

Enterprise networking is the biggest segment with revenue expected to touch $887 million in 2014. Data centre consolidation and virtualisation along with cloud and mobility are the key trends influencing network purchases. There is great potential for both users and vendors to leverage some of the emerging technologies to be ready for the future.

The storage market is on pace to reach $384 million this year, an 11 per cent increase from last year. Storage modernisation 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 2017.