NetApp’s industry research on Flash adoption in EMEA reveals that enterprises require high-performance storage to support critical applications, but almost a quarter have no plans to adopt Flash technologies. This is significant, as 85 percent out of the 3,000 IT decision makers who NetApp surveyed are directly responsible for IT buying decisions.

Key findings in the survey include: 

·        Payments, CRM and business intelligence apps are most performance hungry: Almost half (46 percent) of all survey participants agree that within their businesses, there is a need for high-performance storage technologies. Payment processing, Customer Relations Management (CRM) and Business Intelligence applications require the most consistent levels of high performance, to support business continuity.

·        EMEA Flash market is not saturated: Despite claiming to have high-performance storage requirements, almost a quarter of IT decision makers say they do not support any applications with Flash. Furthermore, only 16 percent use Flash to support payment processing, CRM and Business Intelligence applications, cited as the most critical to business continuity. Over half (52 percent) said customers would become frustrated and almost half (45.8 percent) said customers would lose confidence in their business if Flash storage and the enterprise apps support failed for an hour at peak time. Almost half (48 percent) said this situation would cause the business to lose money.

·        Flash awareness and opportunity for growth is high: Over three quarters (78 percent) of IT decision makers are knowledgeable enough to invest in Flash – the knowledge is strongest among large businesses (28 percent). Despite this awareness, 28 percent of respondents from large EMEA businesses do not have Flash, and have no plans to adopt it. Almost one in five (18 percent) EMEA businesses are planning to adopt Flash and almost half (48 percent) have already adopted it. Meanwhile, among the region’s larger and medium businesses, 14 percent plan to adopt Flash, with the largest potential for growth occurring among smaller businesses (17 percent).  

Gary De Menezes, Country Manager for NetApp South Africa said: “These findings show the appetite companies have for high-performance enterprise applications and that a heavy reliance is placed on them to serve customers and keep day-to-day operations running. Given the mission-critical nature of enterprise apps and high-performance storage to enterprises, it is surprising, but exciting, to see that there is still plenty of scope for further flash adoption. NetApp is committed to driving further education of the business value provided by Flash and helping more enterprises in EMEA take advantage of the opportunities Flash presents.”

NetApp delivers one of the industry’s broadest portfolio of All-Flash arrays, providing customers with the scale, speed and data services required for the next-generation data centre. The NetApp Flash portfolio helps customers achieve the best outcomes across priority deployment models, including performance applications, virtualised infrastructure and cloud-like infrastructure.