Storage

One of the real sizzler areas for 2001, both globally and in India. It’s

all-growth: personal storage, enterprise storage, online storage. High capacity

removable magnetic alternatives to floppies will remain slow-growth, remaining a

niche, and giving way to optical drives. CD-ROM drives will see a further

slowdown, as CDR and CD-RW drives become even cheaper. CDR/CDRW and DVD will

really take off this year, with DVD-R making a splash.

With a staggering amount of data being generated (10 million terabytes

projected across 2001 and 2002), the storage business is growing at twice that

of the hardware average, and outstripping software (after all, where do you

store all the software?). Storage services alone are expected to be $30 billion

globally this year, as storage becomes a key strategic resource for the

enterprise. Storage management software will come close to $8 billion globally,

while hosting will be at least $4 billion (IDC estimates).

At the personal level in India, Dataquest expects storage to go up from 30%

to nearly 40% of a PC’s cost–system prices fall but users add bigger hard

drives and the CDR/DVD genre. Consumer devices such as cameras will grow their

storage capacities rapidly (take Sony’s Mavica with a built-in CDR) and

consumer devices storage will cross $1 billion globally. Finally, the hottest

personal technology will be online storage: a zillion sites like xdrive.com and

others can let users store and share their files free on the Net, or for a small

charge.