Tuesday, 25 July 2006

SMBs Across SE Asia to Invest USD 630 mln On Storage this Year

Small and medium businesses are on track to spend a whopping USD 630 million on data storage-related investments across Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam in the Southeast Asia region this year.

Investments on hardware storage alone will account for more than half of this spending, according to the latest study by New York-based Access Markets International (AMI) Partners Inc.

The results reveal that data storage spending is set to grow more than 20% in each of three different categories of storage—hardware, software and services. The SMB environment continues to be driven by a high level of spending from PC and server-attached storage contributing to more than half of the storage hardware spending in 2005.

"Demand for NAS (network-attached storage) and SAN (storage-area network)-based solutions in the SMB segment is expected to grow at a double-digit pace this year," says Nishant Dave, AMI’s Singapore-based consulting manager. "That’s because these enterprises are now looking at sophisticated storage solutions for their ever-increasing data requirements. Indonesia and Thailand will remain the primary drivers of storage-related investments among SMBs in the SEA region. These two markets alone accounted for more than half of the data storage spending in 2005."

As SMB customers migrate from primitive desktop and server-attached solutions to NAS/SAN-based technologies in the next couple of years, the need for software-based management and storage virtualization will further increase. Backup and recovery software will also be a key investment area among SMBs in SEA this year, driven by the increasing need to manage their hardware investments.

Storage Adoption amongst Medium Businesses in SEA Medium businesses in SEA region (with an employee-size of 100-999) will be the forerunners in adoption of sophisticated SAN- and NAS-based solutions. While the bulk of the deployments of SAN-based solutions will be fiber-channel based, AMI-Partners has observed in its survey a strong growth in customer preference for IP-based SAN solutions. IP SAN will be the fastest growing storage technology among medium businesses in the SEA region in 2006, albeit from a smaller base in 2005.

The survey also revealed that medium businesses in SEA especially in Singapore and Thailand have accorded considerable importance to the need for data back-up and disaster recovery solutions, either deployed in house or hosted through a third party.

Strict regulatory compliance norms and data security-related issues have accentuated the need among medium businesses to accelerate their investments in this area. Although fiber-channel-based SAN spending far exceeds the NAS spending among medium businesses in the region, NAS deployments among medium businesses are still more prevalent in the SEA region with the number of businesses deploying NAS exceeding the number of fiber-channel-based SAN businesses by a factor of two.