'Data centre infra spends to grow marginally at 2.6 percent this year'

The growth in data centre infrastructure hardware spending will be led by a 10 per cent increase in enterprise network equipment to USD 1.442 billion, a Gartner report said.

The spend on servers will decline by 1 per cent to USD 954 million, while the external controller based storage spends will plunge 12.5 per cent to USD 335 million, it said, attributing it to public cloud migration.

"Technologies such as software-defined data centres are helping businesses optimise their existing resources, and as a result reducing overall spend on compute and storage resources," Gartner's research director Santhosh Rao said.

On the overall growth in the broader data centre infrastructure segment, he said that digital business initiatives are forcing infrastructure players to adopt a hybrid IT infrastructure model that can deliver reliable, innovative and cost-effective solutions to the business in a timely manner.

End-user spending on networking equipment is expected to grow in 2018 as organisations modernise their local area network (LAN) and wide area network (WAN) infrastructure to support digital business needs, the report said.

Stating that there will be increased adoption of cloud, the report estimated spending on infrastructure as a service is set to increase 45 per cent to USD 1 billion in 2018, while cloud office suites like Google G suite and Microsoft Office 365 will witness a 37 per cent increase in spends to USD 275 million.