India is confined to witness the growth in the operations of data center owing to the strong demand for IT services not only in domestic market, but also in the international market. The IT industry of India has attained an imperative progress in recent years, which is supported by strong fundamentals. Even during the span of economic downturn, the industry was abreast in sustaining positive growth, driven by strengthened national and international demand of IT facilities.

In-fact the Indian software and services industry has grown up at a remarkable speed since 2001. This is what contributed to the great success story of India’s liberalization. Having a low start in the late 90s, the IT industry has now become a global leader. The initial phase of growth can be estimated as an additional expenditure on IT. While the next phase of the growth resulted from the intimate domestic demand that made the IT industry more racy and resilient.

Major data center locations of India include Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata, Pune, Mumbai and Delhi. But prior to anything else, we need to acknowledge the type of categories of the data centers namely Captive and Hosted. Let’s turn focus to the statistical data conclusion:

The captive data centers have a capacity utilization of approx. 60-70%. The managers of the centers believe that there will be an increase of 80-80% in the utilization within 1 or 1.5 years. Whereas, existing captive centers such as IBM, Ricoh Data Center etc have witnessed a growth of 7-8% in the capacity utilization taking into account the factors like enhanced employee intake to the firm, which is due to the expansion of business activities and service offerings.

Summing up the key outlines:

• Current capacity utilization: 60-70%
• Expected utilization: 80-90%
• Growth witnessed in existing systems: 7-8%

On the other hand, if we talk about the third-party data centers or hosted data centers, they are similar to the captive data centers in terms of growth. The average capacity utilization is 70%, the data center managers have forecasted that their center space will be completely occupied within a span of 2 or 3 years.

Most of the hosted centers have been surveyed in the period of expansion. Several Data centers have recently expanded their operations through construction of the new data centers. 

Such data center units are witnessing demands from the Insurance, Banking and Financial services sector. Apart from these already contributing sectors, the hosted data centers are also witnessing requirements from major Govt. projects like Unique Identification, digitization of govt. processes etc. According to the surveys carried, major portion of data center is occupied by BFSI. This is minutely followed by space for collocation in international telecoms and IT majors.

Summing up the key outlines:

• Growth at CAGR of 30%
• Current capacity utilization : 70%
• Newly established data centers have capacity utilization of less than 50%
• Expected to be completely utilized within 2 years time.

Major clients: BFSI, International Telecoms and IT majors.