The disk storage industry will grow at double-digit levels with worldwide revenues in increasing at a compound annual growth rate of 12 per cent from $US28.4 billion in 1999 to $US53.3 billion in 2004, according to IDC.
Several factors are contributing to the storage market's overall growth, according to IDC analysts. One significant factor is the migration to networked storage, in which demand for nonstop access to information anytime/anywhere will continue to drive storage strategies and revenue growth. According to IDC, packaged applications such as customer relationship management, sales-force automation and data marts; Internet and intranet investments by traditional brick and mortar companies; data warehousing applications growth; the installation of storage capacity by storage service providers; and storage-intensive consumer applications such as imaging, will provide fuel for the storage market. Additionally, as telephone and cable companies introduce infrastructure that can move large amounts of data efficiently and cost-effectively, new consumer markets will continue to drive demand for storage.
The demand for graphic-intensive applications, the popularity of viewing digitised images at online auction sites, the migration from hard copy to soft copy, and demand for Internet-enabled distributed access to medical images and records on the Web demonstrate the continuing need for more storage capacity.