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.