Iomega REVs up its focus on SMBs and SOHO

Iomega Corporation plans to expand into the SMB and SOHO segment with the launch of its new removable hard disk drive. The drive called REV 35GB/90GB has been launched in India and will soon be made available across South East Asia. 

"Through our new REV drive we want to expand into the SMB and the home user space. We are leveraging on design, brand identity and channel strength for this," said Iomega Pacific Ltd senior manager (business development) Sanjiv Gupta. Iomega's distribution partners, Neoteric Informatique Pvt Ltd, Ingram Micro and Tech Pacific India will distribute the product in India.

With the storage devices occupying more than 50 percent of the corporate IT spending, as per the latest IDC estimates, the company is shifting its key focus from zip drives, portable HDDs and optical drives to DVDs, CDRWs, and removable HDDs with the new product launch. 

"We are shifting our focus from the enterprise segment to the SOHO and SMB space as we see an emerging market here. May be not so much in India presently but worldwide the SMB market for storage devices is gearing up," explained Gupta. "We will be looking at channel partners' support for the network based storage products to expand into the SMB space," he further added.

The new REV drive from Iomega is a replace disk drive and is compatible with Windows. However the company is planning to launch the Linux and Unix compatible drives by the end of Q3 and Q4 of 2004. The product priced at Rs 19,900 is available with a one-year warranty. Iomega plans to keep the product price uniform worldwide. The drive is available in both the external USB 2.0 version and the internal ATAPI version.

CyberMedia News 

New Delhi