BANGALORE, INDIA: Founded in 1985, AMI has been consistent as one of the major players having several 'firsts' to its credit: AMI was the first company to build motherboards based on the Intel 386 and 486 processor platforms; first to support USB in BIOS, and first to integrate diagnostics into BIOS.

Its India operations started in 1994 as an offshore software development R&D wing of AMI USA, and has also been involved in rendering embedded solutions and software development services to customers worldwide.

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Recently, CIOL met with Sridharan Mani, director and CEO of American Megatrends India to know about the company’s journey so far. Excerpts:

CIOL: Initially AMI was more of a BIOS company and later moved to storage space. Could you share with us your story towards this transition?

Sridharan Mani: AMI is in the industry for the past 25 years, both in the product as well as services space. We have over 100+ patents and bulk of them, around 60, in the storage space.

We started as a BIOS company. The very first motherboard for Dell was built by us. Today, we have over half a billion computers in the world running on our BIOS. Later, we built our own diagnostic products mainly for testing our own products.

In India, all major players use our products. When the industry was moving from PC-based environment to connected world with the introduction of LAN, WAN and so on, people who used to handle one system, all of a sudden had to handle several connected systems.

During this period, we thought of introducing our storage product, MegaRAID, which we thought as a natural progression for the networked world.

In fact, Dell adopted our MegaRAID for their products. Later we also launched MegaRAC, centralized collaborative management console and we became no.1 in this space as well.

So with all these, we had built 80 per cent of what is needed for storage space. So as a natural progression we moved to storage arena.

When 9/11 happened all of a sudden people were worried about data security and started thinking about disaster recovery. During this time we came up with IP SAN-NAS based solution called StorTrends, it is our flagship product.

CIOL: Why didn't you look at consumer segment?

Sridharan: We are more enterprise oriented and OEM oriented organisation. We feel there is no much challenge in that space.