"EMC is the caretaker of the world's information"

As country manager of EMC Computer Systems, T Srinivasan is responsible for building up the storage market for his organization in India. His challenge is to replicate the company's global performance in the Indian market. EMC, a Fortune 500 company, is considered a leader in the e-infrastructure business. Srinivasan aims to set the benchmark for storage solutions and customer service standards. Armed with six years of experience with Oracle India as director, sales, Srinivasan is confident of achieving his objective.

How do you plan to replicate EMC's success in enterprise storage systems in India?

We started our Indian operations about six months ago and today we have offices in Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi. During the last few months we have concentrated on our business plans for the first two years of operations. We have predominantly spent time on talking to channel partners and educating some of our key customers and prospects on the need for enterprise storage. We would continue to do this for the next two years. 

It is important for us to create a new market space as people have been buying storage along with servers. It is up to EMC to educate customers about the benefits of the independent, intelligent, enterprise storage.

What are your initiatives for the current year?

Initiatives for the current year would include creating market awareness for EMC's storage solutions and educating end users. We would look at channel partners who would jointly help us educate customers. 

Currently we have tied up with Wipro and are also looking at other system integrators who could help us to drive our objectives into the market. Apparently our global alliance with Oracle, Microsoft, Price WaterHouse, KPMG etc, would prove beneficial for our Indian operations. In fact with players like Oracle and Cisco we have specific alliance called the 'Eco-structure' alliance, where the key companies are working closely to deliver future products and services.

How exactly do you propose to create market awareness and achieve sales in the country? Where will the channels fit in your game plan?

Our key initiatives for the current year are widening our channel base, promoting the Symmetrix / Clariion product range in India by developing channel strategies to market this product range in large scale and strengthening our support team in India. Our business model for India is based on channels. We would be conducting transactions through our channel network. We would not be dealing with end customers directly as our marketing strategies are planned with channels being the core of operations. 

However we would be having an account team who along with our channel partners will focus directly on the end customers to educate them and will go through the entire process to scale up an inquiry to the procurement and fulfillment stages.

What is unique to EMC's storage solutions?

EMC today is a leader in the enterprise storage solution. We realized that storage can be independent of the servers and that it can co-exist irrespective of which server is being used. With EMC's Storage Solutions you are not stuck with one operating system. The software that comes along with our storage solutions handles backup and also restores the same. 



EMC Storage Solution is the key to your e-infrastructure. It consolidates your information, making it much easier for you to utilize that data advantageously. It puts information at the center of your business, enabling you to access, share, protect, and manage it in new and more profitable ways.

EMC's Storage Solutions come with a unique feature called the 'dial home' facility. The storage box comes with software, which tests each component for its fatigue level. The software dials home (the support center at Massachusetts, USA) as soon as it detects the component's threshold level. The center will in turn call the local support engineers who will replace the component before the system goes down. This will ensure 'zero' downtime.

How will you provide support for your products? Will it be handled online?

To add value to our storage solutions, we have a very strong support team which combines the industry's most advanced remote service technology with the global reach, hands-on expertise and 24x7 commitment of highly skilled service teams. Using the latest diagnostic technology - including telecommunications links that continuously monitor and report on the status of each installed system. EMC's built-in service approach is designed to detect errors before a data unavailability condition occurs.

On the whole, our storage systems, software, networks and services ensure fast, round-the-clock access to all the information businesses. To EMC's customers, EMC is the caretaker of the world's information.

EMC's average annual revenues in the past three years have grown by 130 percent. What has contributed to this high growth?

I think that it is directly related to the way the market has progressed. With the advent of the Internet economy the need for online storage has increased tremendously. IDC predicts the growth of storage market to be that the rate of 1,800 percent between 1998 and 2003, which is phenomenal. According to studies, the storage market will outstrip the server market space. Storage market will be the fastest growing segment in the whole IT business.

Unfortunately there are no figures that we can talk about for the Indian market. This is because storage system still remains as a part of the server in India, which we foresee to change within the next year or two. I think the market will start looking at internal and external storage devices as niche products in the coming years.

Sunila Paul



in Bangalore