History 2003: Only 24% of European Users’ Storage Budgets to Increase in 2003

IDC carried out a survey of European user storage, Storage in a networked world: assessing changing end user attitudes in an uncertain economy ($4,500), among 520 IT managers on the storage market in August and September 2002.

The sample was spread across four regions (UK, Germany, France, Italy/Spain, Nordic countries) with about 100 respondents for each ones.

The survey was spread evenly across small, medium and large enterprises.

Here are the main conclusions. In terms of IT budgets, the overall picture was gloomy for the year ahead. The majority of the respondents (68%) expected total IT budgets to either remain the same or decrease in the next 12 months. However, out of these only 14% said they expected overall IT spend to decrease in the coming year.

“Expectancies for storage expense budgets in the coming year were lower than for IT budgets with 24% seeing an increase in the coming year. 12% said they saw expected storage expense budgets to decline in the next 12 months and 63% said they saw them remaining the same,” wrote Zarah Damji, storage analyst at IDC and author of the report.

But SAN have certainly penetrated the EMEA storage market with 30% of respondents claiming to have a SAN installed.

NAS devices appear to have penetrated to a lesser extent than SANs.

By country, the greatest tendency towards adding a SAN into storage environments was in France with 36% of respondents saying that they would be very or quite likely to install one in the next 24 months. The UK was the 2nd largest opportunity for selling SANs into with 21% of respondents saying they would be very or quite likely to add a SAN to their infrastructure in the next two years. In the Nordics, where penetration was highest, only 7% of the sample said they would install a SAN solution in the coming 2 years. Results were similar among Spanish and Italian respondents, where penetration of SANs were also high with only 16% saying they were very or quite likely to add a SAN to their organizations within 2 years.

Outside of the whole SAN/NAS dichotomy, the sample identified an opportunity for selling storage management software into larger organizations across Europe. The overall average of respondents who said they would invest in storage management software or increase their investment in the next 24 months was relatively low at 35%.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 181 on February 2003 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.