1/3 of WW Enterprise Storage Sytems Spending by 2017 for APeJ, CEMA, Latin America – IDC

The regional landscape for enterprise storage is in the midst of change as spending in emerging markets begins to outpace spending in more mature regions.

According to research from International Data Corporation, Central Europe, Middle East, and Africa (CEMA) will surpass Japan in terms of enterprise storage end user spending in 2014. And by 2015, AsiaPac (excluding Japan) or APeJ will unseat a struggling Western Europe as the second largest region behind only the United States.

"Some emerging regions, specifically, APeJ, the Middle East, and Africa, will continue growing at high rates, fueled by long-term demands for storage and the creation of new storage infrastructures in fast-growing economies," said Natalya Yezhkova, research director, storage systems, IDC. "Other emerging regions are expected to maintain growth rates that are comparable to those of more mature regions."

Overall, after two years of exceptional growth, the enterprise storage systems market has come back to earth as users embrace more efficient ways to store data. End-user spending is now expected to grow at a modest CAGR of 4.1% during the 2012-2017 forecast period, reaching $42.5 billion by 2017. However, a slowdown in revenue growth is no indication that end-user demand for storage capacity will be diminished. Digital media and content, data protection, and archiving will be among the major drivers behind continuous demand for more storage capacity.

"Adoption of storage efficiency technologies and cloud services will contribute to modestly slower growth in enterprise storage system capacity shipped," added Yezhkova.

More than 102EB of external and over 36EB of internal storage system capacity will be shipped in 2017, still significantly higher than the 20EB external and 8EB internal storage shipped in 2012. To store the data in the most efficient way, users must not only implement various technologies that help eliminate redundant copies of the data or boost utilization rates of available storage assets, but also increasingly consider moving beyond their own datacenters and adding third-party storage services (public and private) to the pool of viable storage options.

Additional findings:

• Emerging regions (APeJ, CEMA, and Latin America combined) will account for one third of worldwide enterprise storage systems spending by 2017, up from 28% in 2012;
• Annual growth in storage capacity shipped is expected to remain moderate: 35-40% for external storage and 33-38% for internal storage;
• Customers from emerging regions are less tied to legacy infrastructures and are more open to considering a broad range of solutions, including products from regional and local suppliers and cloud service offerings.

The IDC forecast, Worldwide Enterprise Storage Systems 2013-2017 Forecast: Customer Landscape Is Changing, Defining Demand for New Solutions (IDC #241033), is an annual rollup of IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Forecast, which was released in March 2013 and provides a detailed forecast by region by quarter for 1Q13–4Q14 and annually through 2017. The quarterly forecast covers the majority of the market segments discussed in the annual study with the exception of the split by media type, which breaks the market into three categories: I/O-intensive, performance-optimized, and capacity-optimized storage systems.