Services the biggest area of opportunity for Australia

Gartner’s latest storage report says that the Australian small-and-midsize-business market is a “mixed bag” of opportunity for vendors. Services remains the strongest area with resellers needing to concentrate on their service offering to increase growth.

Many users don’t have a budget for storage hardware, software or services, but 38%, 28% and 29% plan to increase spending on hardware, software and services, respectively, during the next year.

Seventy percent of the users in Australia indicated that storage accounted for less than 10% of their yearly IT budget. This percentage is higher than in most countries/markets surveyed. In Australia, the tendency to buy hardware is among the strongest in the region, with nearly 61% of users planning to spend a majority of their storage budget on external controller-based disk arrays, network-attached storage (NAS), storage area network (SAN) products and other technologies that fall under the purview of storage hardware. Gartner’s research also indicated that backup and replication software will receive the greatest amount of new budget dollars during the next year.