Mumbai, May 14 , 2013: The top four tech priorities of India’s IT enterprises are Business Intelligence , Mobile technology, collaboration and the Cloud -- and surprise, surprise! – that’s the identical list albeit reordered – of the rest of the world. Other technologies in the Indian top ten are Supply Chain Management, Virtualization, Business Process Management, IT Management Technology, Security technology and Social media. 
Against this background, tech analysts Gartner expect the Indian IT infrastructure market, comprising of server, storage and networking equipment, to total $2.1 billion in 2013, growing 9.7 percent compared to 2012. A healthy growth rate is expected to see this rise to just shy of $3 billion by 3017, explained Naveen Mishra, Research Director and Conference Chair of the 2-day Gartner Infrastructure, Operations and Data Centre Summit which concluded in Mumbai today.
“Despite global economic challenges, India provides strong growth opportunities across segments including infrastructure. Infrastructure alone is expected to surpass $2.9 billion in 2017,” added Mishra, “The Nexus of Forces- big data, cloud, social and mobility- are finding real-time business driven use cases which is bringing a paradigm shift in the way IT is delivering business impact and hence, changing the role of an Indian CIO.”
The Indian IT infrastructure market is driven by hardware refresh, optimization and consolidation efforts. New data centre build out, primarily driven by service providers, is providing added impetus to this market. The server market accounts for the biggest chunk of the market totaling 753 million in 2013 and forecast to total $962.3 million in 2017. Increased uptake of x86 based technologies, coupled with continued investment in virtualization, will drive server growth. Virtualization is extending beyond servers and is setting the stage for private cloud adoption in many of the leading organizations.
External controller-based storage is the fastest growing segment with revenue growing from $374.2 million in 2013 to $702.3 million in 2017. While managing the storage demands is one of the biggest problems faced by Indian users, approaches such as tiered storage are helping to optimize storage needs. Integrating software driven intelligence in the storage market is another phenomenon which is gaining traction in India.   www.gartner.com/in/datacenter  .