Local India channel partners are assuming greater role in the SMB server market, says AMI

Recently, AMI has published key findings of its “2013 India SMB Server and Storage Study”.
According to the study, the Indian   SMB server market is presently experiencing a healthy growth rate of 12%. The current India SMB server market amounts to approximately $300 million and is expected to grow to over $500 million by 2017. These are some of the key highlights of AMI’s soon to be published “2013 India SMB Server and Storage Study”.

Indian SMBs operating in the manufacturing and IT/ITeS space continue to be on the watch list of major server vendors as they are expected to fuel the demand for servers. Verticals such as manufacturing are striving for automation and to increase productivity across the entire value chain. Applications such as CRM and ERP are also being adopted by Indian SMBs.

Pratik Gupta, Associate at AMI-Partners India, said, Smaller SMBs are generally laggards in terms of technology adoption. They are in the process of setting up their IT infrastructure and are still dependent on basic IT components. On the other hand, larger SMBs are early technology adopters. They utilize servers for advanced line of business applications such as CRM, ERP and analytics. Furthermore, these businesses have gradually started adopting virtualization.

In fact, channel partners are aggressively looking at becoming solution providers for India SMBs rather than mere box-pushers. There is a significant level of collaboration between channel partners and SMBs in the management of IT infrastructure and decision-making, added Gupta.
Vendors are focussing on ensuring partner efficiency through regular partner programmes. These programmes are aimed at both the partners’ technical and the sales teams.