"A great place to grow," is Elly Keinan's take on India. Quizzed further, IBM's VP, Worldwide Storage Systems Sales, pins the talent pool and the market possibilities as reference points to his simplistic view on IBM's burgeoning interest in the Indian storage market. 

"In India, the only constraint is how quickly we can scale with regard to our operations, field resources, support infrastructure, etc. Adding partners and focusing on right segments is just as important," says Keinan, who is on his first visit to India since assuming charge as Vice President. 

Shailesh Agarwal, Country Manager, Storage, clears the air. IBM is eyeing partners across the hardware and applications space, he says. "We have launched an 'Influencer' program focused on application ISV and a separate program for hardware partners. Such a process does not call for significant upfront investment, just a significant value proposition, and we have that." 

Telecom, banking, software and SMBs are verticals in IBM's scheme of things, says Keinan. On the newfound interest in the SMB segment in India, he says: "SMBs are surely the volume business proposition. Within the SMB space, we are looking at manufacturing, services and finance/banking. Our ability to introduce new technology at a very rapid pace suits us in this space. We can also hit the market with the right channel partners." 

Agarwal buttressed the professed focus on SMBs. "Performance buys differ according to markets, but we offer the required granularity. A terabyte is just the same across geographical regions and for different people, but our attempt is to put across products with different performance parameters." 

The only thing lacking in the IBM portfolio, he says, was a robust NAS product. "The NetApp alliance and the N5000 series have helped fill the gap and completed our line-up. Also, a lab in Pune is dedicated to storage R&D... NetApp is key to binding technologies through unifying protocols." 

Infrastructure simplification, business continuity and information lifecycle management are key areas from his perspective, says Keinan. The first mentioned naturally led to virtualization which, he said, had become an overall initiative that also called for a greater openness to openness. 

The SAN Volume Controller (SVC) virtualization engine, he pointed out, was amenable to IBM, Hitachi, Sun, NetApp and EMC among others. 

"The NetApp alliance has helped greatly with NAS. We have launched the N5200 and the N5500 in India ahead of the worldwide release. These comprise the second series of products brought out in collaboration with NetApp and the new accent is on small and medium business," says Keinan. 

While accepting the need for price competitiveness, he observes, "A very focused view on budgets and price is a rather limited view. Contrary to perception, customers in India are very tech-savvy and want the sophistication they are looking for." (CIOL Bureau)

SAM VARGHESE 
BANGALORE

Page(s)   1