While data centre infrastructure hardware spending by enterprises in India will reach $2.7 billion in 2018, a 2.6 per cent increase from 2017, the software investment will register 10 per cent increase to touch $3.6 billion mark, a new report from market research firm Gartner said on Tuesday.
"Digital business initiatives are forcing infrastructure and operations leaders in India to adopt a hybrid IT infrastructure model that can deliver reliable, innovative and cost-effective solutions to the business in a timely manner," Santhosh Rao, Research Director at Gartner, said in a statement.
As organisations modernise their Local Area Network (LAN) and Wide Area Network (WAN) infrastructure to support digital business needs, end-user spending on networking equipment is expected to grow in 2018.
In contrast, on-premises server and storage spending would decline marginally as a result of Public Cloud migration.
"Technologies such as Software-Defined Data Centres (SDDC) are helping businesses optimise their existing resources and as a result reducing overall spend on compute and storage resources," added Rao.
Gartner also said that with most organisations having a Cloud-first strategy -- and new business applications are most likely to be developed and hosted using Public Cloud services -- the spending on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) in India is set to reach $1 billion in 2018 -- up 45.5 per cent year-over-year.
In addition, the availability of hyperscale data centres such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure in India as well as local providers ramping up to provide public cloud services have become compelling reasons for Indian organisations to move toward IaaS.
According to Gartner, an increase in the number of migrations of on-premises office suites to software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based offerings like Google G suite and Microsoft Office 365 is another notable trend.
Indian businesses are expected to spend close to $275 million on Cloud office suites in 2018 - a 37 per cent increase year-over-year, the firm noted.