Advertisment

'India’s business driver for the storage market is its telecommunication infrastructure.'

author-image
DQC Bureau
New Update

As VP for StorageTek’s Asia Pacific region, Kevin Eggleston is responsible

for every aspect of StorageTek’s operations. His management has seen the

opening of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou Rep offices, its Korean subsidiary,

as well as the establishment of its headquarters in Hong Kong. Last year, the

region achieved approximately $ 100 million in annual revenue. In town to launch

StorageTek’s direct presence in India, he outlines the company’s marketing

initiatives for the country.

Advertisment

How important is the Indian market in terms of revenue

growth and market share for StorageTek?

StorageTek views India as a huge emerging market, with

enormous potential for the company. India is one of the top growing markets for

us, as more and more Indian corporations and government bodies have begun to

recognize the importance of storage and retrieval of large volumes of data as a

vital function.

We also see India and China as the two fastest growing

markets in the world. These two countries together account for a major portion

of our Asia-Pacific revenue and will continue to be an integral part of our

revenue stream in this region.

Advertisment

Besides the fact that the Indian storage market is growing so

rapidly compared to other countries in Asia-Pacific, the country also has a

better distributed approach due to a telecommunications infrastructure, which is

developing in a big way. We believe that the key business driver for the storage

market in India is its telecommunication infrastructure.

Could you elaborate StorageTek’s expansion plans in the

Asia Pacific region?

Although virtualization is an attractive proposition, users have been rather 



slow to catch on

Advertisment

StorageTek has been opening up offices in the Asia-Pacific

region with a big emphasis on storage virtualization. Currently, we have

established offices in Shanghai and Guangzhou on Mainland China and in Taipei.

At the same time our office in India will house both the sales and support

staff.

StorageTek’s expansion in this region reflects its

confidence in getting good business here. In Greater China, we achieved 50

percent revenue growth compared to last year. The first quarter of 2001 alone

recorded a 140 percent growth over Q1 last year, which is dramatic.

StorageTek´s performance is not a standalone phenomenon but

is also reflected by the booming worldwide storage management software market

which according to Gartner Dataquest is projected to reach $ 16.7 billion by

2005 compared to $ 5.3 billion in 2000.

Advertisment

The idea of sharing storage resources, has become a buzzword

in the last twelve months. It is a term that every vendor is talking about but

not everyone defines it very well. We are now working with some of the analyst

companies to try to get an industry accepted definition of virtualization.

What strategy have you adopted to market your storage

solutions in India?

According to sources like IDC and the general print sources,

the storage market in India is pegged to reach $ 100 million by the year 2002.

StorageTek initiated sales in India through distributors in late 1998 and has

been encouraged by the acceptance it has gained so far. By 2002, we plan to

achieve a 30 percent share in the Indian external storage market against the

current share of 15 percent.

Advertisment

For the transactional business we follow a two-tier

distribution model. We have partnered with Tech Pacific for marketing our

storage solutions in the country. TechPac will in turn leverage its extensive

channel network for redistribution across the country.

For the relationship business involving the high-end storage

solutions a fair bit of technical consulting is involved and we have three high

power partners, namely Wipro Infotech, CMS Computers and CMC, who engage

customers directly for their high end requirements.

In India, StorageTek already caters to banking and financial

majors such as ICICI Bank, National Stock Exchange, ANZ Grindlays, Bombay Stock

Exchange, as well as global technology players such as Cisco, Lucent and Satyam.

Our main objective is to stay in close touch with our customers both directly

and through channel partners. This is because we believe that the key to

achieving revenue and market share growth is by keeping them happy.

Advertisment

What future storage technologies do you plan to introduce

in the market?

The key to achieving revenue and market share growth is by keeping customers and the channel happy

We plan to affirm our support for storage virtualization

technology and at the same time will announce latest models of virtual disk.

Storage virtualization is a simple term for a relatively complicated method of

separating the physical medium of data storage from the process of storage

allocation. For example, when a network administrator allocates storage for a

person or department, a portion of a physical disk drive or tape is set aside

when the allocation is made. With virtualization, the system knows about the

allocation, but no physical space is set aside. When space isn’t physically

allocated, more of the disk can be used, because in practice no one ever uses

all of the storage set aside for them. The increased efficiency can translate

into significant cost savings.

Advertisment

Currently, People are buying more storage than they need. We

see that most people use between 30 and 60 percent of the storage they own. We’re

trying to get them to think about how much data they want to store versus how

many drives they think they need to buy.

Aside from cost savings from more efficient hardware usage,

virtualization also saves money by reducing staffing needs. Since storage is all

virtual, administrators are not stuck moving data from disk to disk when certain

disk volumes fill up as others sit unused. But even though virtualization is an

attractive proposition, users and storage vendors have been slow to catch on.

That’s partly because virtualization is easier said than

done. In fact, we are one of the handful companies that have a working

virtualization product. And even with this edge, the company isn’t guaranteed

a slam dunk. For one thing, StorageTek is still having difficulties getting past

its reputation as an expert in tape backup systems.

What other problems do you face with respect to

virtualization?

Companies don’t necessarily think of StorageTek when they

think of hard disks. Most importantly, few administrators have even heard of

virtualiza-tion, and those who have don’t quite understand how it works or why

it is important.

And since there is more than one way to add virtualization to

a storage area network or server, confusion only continues to grow. However,

virtualiza-tion will eventually catch on industry-wide.

In the meantime, however, companies may want to evaluate

products that use the technology. We at StorageTek think it’s a really

important step for storage solutions, as it allows users to utilize resources

better.

SUNILA PAUL in Bangalore

Advertisment