“We want to build the storage business as the fastest growing brand in India”

How do
you
define 'Growth Markets and Major Markets' at IBM? How is the
Indian market growing?

Apart from
major markets like Europe, Japan, North America, there are 149
countries under 'Growth Markets.' And these are the fastest
growing markets for us. I take care of all these growth markets.
Moreover, the characteristics and selling and buying patterns of
partners and customers are quite unique across these countries.
Our
growth markets unit is growing twice as fast as overall storage
business. Additionally, the focus of these markets highly
revolve
around mid market. Out of 149 countries, India, China and Brazil
are
the top 3 markets for us. Hence, for IBM, India is the fastest
growing market for storage business.

What is
IBM's current partners program for its storage partners?

We are in
the
process of rolling out our global Storage Specialty Program
(SSP).
This program is designed to reward IBM Business Partners, who
make a
significant investment in skills and certifications, customer
references and have the ability to successfully sell and deploy
IBM System
Storage solutions. The program has two tiers-Specialty and
Specialty Elite.

How is
the
Specialty layer different from Specialty Elite in the program?

IBM
Business
Partners, who meet the eligibility criteria will receive a suite
of
benefits including proactive support resources (aligned
personnel),
planning workshops, finance benefits, and education advantage.
IBM
has packaged a suite of benefits for qualifying system storage
specialty business partners, designed to help facilitate the
development of successful, sustainable, IBM System Storage
practices.

IBM is
committed to provide additional resources to our top business
partners as we pursue an aggressive program of growth through
2012
and beyond. In addition, IBM will continue to align resources
and
benefits to those business partners who actively demonstrate a
willingness to invest in IBM skills and aligned resources. The
partners will also get an opportunity to provide value to their
clients
because they can also have access to IBM Storage Infrastructure
Optimization (SIO) Study and Assessment that demonstrates key
business benefits to the client organization. style="font-weight: normal">Globally,
Wysetek, Lauren and Galaxy are some of the key storage
specialty
partners.

Can you
share the names of some India based partners, who will be part
of
this SSP?

We have
identified 40 key partners across India. Having said that, we
are
still in the process of selecting fast-growing partners. This
program
has several layers of eligibility, which partners have to meet
to
qualify before becoming part of this program. Hence, we are
internally evaluating our partner's strength, and will take a
final
call soon. At this point of time, we have selected 15 of these
partners from India, and others are still into consideration.
Looking
at our Indian partners strength, we have over 1,000 business
partners
and 3,000 registered partners in India, but there are 1,000
partners
who are willing to put their time and investment on IBM
portfolio.
IBM has an objective to build storage
business as the fastest growing brand in India.

How is
IBM
positioning its storage mid-market portfolio to make deeper
footprints?

Storwize
V7000 product is a mid-range organic product by us. Typically,
in
mid-range and lowend IBM has been largely OEM, but we have our
own
branded developed products now. V7000 is a storage product built
with
virtualization all built together price range and features
needed by
mid market. We also have two bundles, RAS (Rapid Application
Storage)
but it couples flash copy manager, services portion for DR, TCP
product. In addition, we recently introduced bundle of RAB
(Rapid
Application Backup).