India DC Colocation, Hosting Mkt To Reach $609.1 Mn In 2012

The datacentre colocation and hosting market in India is estimated to reach $609.1 million in 2012, according to Gartner, Inc. The market will experience consistent growth through 2016 when the market is forecast to total $1.3 billion.

Indian datacentre capacity is poised to touch 6.6 million square feet by 2016, with service providers driving majority of the growth.

“A virtualisation-led consolidation strategy seems to be the common thread across most datacentres in India, which would lead to moderate capacity growth,” said Naresh Singh principal research analyst at Gartner. “Indian datacentre managers are becoming increasingly concerned about facilities (power, cooling and space) and disaster recovery (DR) for reasons of cost optimisation and business continuity,” he said.

As Indian organisations move through growth trajectories, it is putting significant pressure on their IT infrastructure, including datacentres. The increased focus on datacentre efficiency, agility, reliability and cost optimisation in India has led to a few interesting changes. Enterprises with a large captive datacentre 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 datacentre partner fulfilling their infrastructure growth plans.

“Indian telecommunications service providers such as Reliance, Tata, Airtel and Sify have rapidly expanded their datacentre business during the last three years, adding several hundred square feet of datacentre 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,” said Mishra.

Other players are entering the market, including other Indian telecom service providers, such as Tulip, BSNL and MTNL; and system integrators such as Dimension Data (earlier Datacraft Asia), SIS and Trimax. Gartner inquiries indicate a general increase in interest by the investor community around datacentres in India. Gartner analysts believe there will be increased outsourcing of datacentre requirements in the forecast period because of the big datacentre users, such as banks and government.