Gartner forecasts the data center
colocation and hosting market in India will reach $609.1 million in 2012. The
market will experience consistent growth through 2016 when the market is
forecast to total $1.3 billion.

 

“A virtualization-led consolidation
strategy seems to be the common thread across most data centers in India, which
would lead to moderate capacity growth,” said Naresh Singh, principal research
analyst at Gartner.

 

“Indian data center managers are becoming
increasingly concerned about facilities (power, cooling and space) and disaster
recovery (DR) for reasons of cost optimization and business continuity,” Singh
added.

 

The increased focus on data center
efficiency, agility, reliability and cost optimization in India has led to a
few interesting changes. Enterprises with a large captive data center presence
may not necessarily exercise this in a big way, but the midmarket and
government-owned enterprises are increasingly investing in hosting or managed
services, primarily to ensure that they can focus on their core business and
get a highly skilled data center partner fulfilling their infrastructure growth
plans.

 

Gartner also
forecasts that Indian data center capacity is poised to touch 6.6 million
square feet by 2016, with service providers driving majority of the growth.

 

“Indian telecommunications service
providers such as Reliance, Tata, Airtel and Sify have rapidly expanded their
data center business during the last three years, adding several hundred square
feet of data center space in the Tier 1 cities – primarily in Mumbai, Delhi,
and Bangalore,” said Naveen Mishra, principal research analyst at Gartner .

 

“Carrier-neutral hosting providers such as
Netmagic and CtrlS have had strategic investors funding them to expand their
operations by building new sites in cities such as Mumbai and Bangalore,”
Mishra added.

 

Other Indian telecom service providers,
such as Tulip, BSNL and MTNL; and system integrators such as Dimension Data (earlier Datacraft
Asia), SIS and Trimax are also entering the market.

 

Gartner research shows a general increase
in interest by the investor community around data centers in India. Gartner
analysts believe there will be increased outsourcing of data center
requirements in the forecast period because of the big data center users, such
as banks and government.

By Telecomlead.com Team