IBM is bullish on the growth prospects of enterprise server demand in India in 2021 with companies and
institutions getting back on track after the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted businesses in 2020.

IBM saw a shift in priority among its clients during the pandemic with the focus on strengthening the IT infrastructure to handle core workloads and disaster recovery.

“We saw a good amount of spotlight that came into core workloads which run the businesses. Organisations across industries could not always get their people into the data centres because of the lockdown. So a big requirement was the need to have ample capacity to run workloads. We saw many of our clients focus on disaster recovery. Capacity addition also happened because a lot of things have started happening online,” said Ravi Jain, systems leader, India & South Asia, IBM.

Jain said the growth of the server market is directly correlated to the growth in workload. “We expect the overall market to grow across industries. Banking and financial services, telecom, retail and healthcare are segments that will see a lot of growth,” he said.

“In the regulated industry, such as banks and financial services, they need to have higher availability of capacity and disaster recovery. There will be continued investment in those sectors. Just before the pandemic, there was focus on digital transformation using AI to bring in more efficiency and intelligence in decision making. Some of those digital transformation initiatives is going to drive growth in 2021,” Jain said.