The Indian IT infrastructure market will total $1.9 billion in 2016, a 1 percent increase from 2015, according to Gartner Inc. The IT infrastructure market includes server, storage and enterprise networking equipment.

Gartner analysts are providing the latest trends shaping the future of the data center market during the fifth annual Gartner Infrastructure, Operations and Data Center Summit, which is taking place here through Wednesday at the Hotel Renaissance, Mumbai.

“Indian enterprises will continue to focus on optimizing their infrastructure and operations budgets in 2016,” said Naveen Mishra, research director at Gartner. “Optimization is primarily driven with an objective to create next generation data center architecture that can support the ever increasing challenges of digital business. With the emergence of bimodal IT, there are a lot of investments made in Mode 1, and is an increasing focus on building Mode 2 infrastructure.”

Mode 1 workloads are witnessing investments in areas such as cloud, software defined storage and network coupled with integrated systems. Public cloud is increasingly becoming relevant for data center managers and IT leaders in India. Though its in the early days, DevOps is another area which is gaining traction in India within IT operations teams.

Enterprise networking is the biggest segment within the Indian IT infrastructure market with revenue expected to total $848 million in 2016 (see Table 1). This is an area where enterprises are focusing heavily in terms of their optimization efforts and evaluating software driven networking, as this is becoming a barrier to a seamless digital experience.

Table 1: Indian IT Infrastructure Revenue By Technology (Millions of U.S. Dollars)

Source: Gartner (April 2016)

“With a revenue projection of $253 million in 2016, storage investment will witness a decline from last year primarily due to improved price performance,” said Mr. Mishra. “Enterprises are increasingly investing in software defined storage, evaluating alternate, cheaper devices, such as flash storage, which is helping them to contain the ever increasing storage costs.”