A report from IDC states that the External Storage Market Witnessed a Significant Year-on-Year Growth (16 percent) due to Increased Spending across Verticals in Q3 2015.

1. Storage Industry – The Holistic View of 2015
Storage industry funding:
A report from IDC states that the External Storage Market Witnessed a Significant Year-on-Year
Growth (16 percent) due to Increased Spending across Verticals in Q3 2015. The enterprise
storage industry hasbeen witnessinganuprise in the size of investment since 2013. Approximately
$5.7B has been invested in this space in the last 5 years. The investment took an upward trend
especially in the last 3 years with 2013 being the year that saw maximum funding of $1.4B.
New companies formed:
It’sa commonknownfactthat the data storage industry hasprogressed fromHDDsto cloud storage.
Hard diskswere invented andintroduced byIBMin 1956 followed bythe SSDand Flashmemory. We
are now in an era of IOT and cloud storage and throughout the progression we have witnessed the
rise and growth of start-ups in each of these segments. In 2012, maximum number of companies
were formed, with players such as Data Gravity(Storage Management), Qumulo (Hybrid
Storage), PernixData (Server Side Caching) coming into being. But with the rise of late stage
investmentsincreased,the storage segmenthasbeguntoobserve adipinthe numberof companies
beingformed. 2015 saw a marginal dipin this phenomenon. One of the reasons for the decline can
be the fact that a number of M&A s that took place in this year. Dell acquired EMC at a whooping

2. record of $67B while Sandiskwasacquired at $19B by Western Digital and Seagate acquired DotHill
Systems for $694m.
Some of the start - ups that sprouted thoughin2015, and lookinterestingare TransferSoft
(Comprehensive DataMovement),Komprise (Analytics-DrivenDataManagement),Portworx
(Container-aware Storage),AccelStor(High-performance All FlashArrays), Infinidat (Advanced
UnifiedStorage Solution),NexGenStorage( PCIe FlashAcceleration),Rubrik(SimplifyingData
Protection).
Technologywise Storage space Funding

3. Hybridstorage rose as the mostpopulartechnologyinthe storage space toreceive maximum
fundingin2015. Accordingto a reportby Google forthisspace,the term“ConvergedInfrastructure”
saw an exponentialgrowthinsearch algorithms during2015. It isan upcomingtechnologyandhas
seena decentshare of funding inthe year2015. Amongstart-upsfundingthe othertechnologies
that were popularwere backup,All flashArraysandSSDs.
Future likelihoods:
The enterprise storage market is expected to rise in single digit terms of CAGR for 2014 – 19’.
Investments will majorly be expected from the communication and media, banking and
manufacturing verticals as technology refresh, surveillance, digital transformation and IoT
workloads will take a major portion of growth.
Graph source: Tracxn