From information access management to storage to security, SMEs are focused on broadening the role of technology within their organizations, says HP's Som Satsangi
BANGALORE, INDIA: HP is very confident about its various end-to-end solutions offered to the burgeoning Indian SME sector. The technology major is already enjoying a dominant position in the SME segment, which is going to witness a dramatic increase in the technology adoption rate in the coming years. In an interaction with CIOL, Som Satsangi, director, Enterprise Server, Storage and Networking, HP India, talks about the Indian SME sector and the company's various offerings to the market.
How do you see the future of the Indian SME market? What is the technology adoption trend among SMEs?
In India, the small and medium enterprises (SME) sector plays a pivotal role in the overall industrial economy of the country. In the recent years, the SME sector has consistently registered higher growth rate compared to the overall industrial sector.
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There are opportunities abound for the SME market to adopt technologies that will advance their operations and expand their sales capabilities. From information access management to storage to security, SMEs are focused on broadening the role of technology within their organizations.
Small businesses are being encouraged to embrace cloud computing technologies such as cloud hosting to help reduce costs and improve efficiency. Cloud collaboration applications will become more powerful and less expensive over the coming decade. Both private and public clouds are gaining significant momentum.
SMEs will broadly adopt both applications and infrastructure which continue to exist in the public cloud. While storage and CRM are two verticals which have significant public cloud adoption, analytics and long tail applications specific to verticals will see more adoption in the private cloud.
HP as an infrastructure vendor is creating packaged private cloud stacks with fully-designed architecture for SMEs. As the packaged private cloud products are penetrating into the market, the trend of private cloud adoption should gain significant momentum.
Some of the upcoming trends in SME sector are as follows:
Mobile Applications: There are plenty of applications that are appropriate and useful for SMEs, but no vendor or service has substantively started capitalizing on the value of mobile applications in an applications store environment for SMEs. Mobile communication service providers will soon create packages of mobile applications for SMEs.
Cloud-Based Services: SMEs will continue to favor cloud-based email, messaging, and collaboration solutions. Also, CSPs (Communication Service Providers) are expected to offer more cloud-based storage and back-up solutions, as well as begin to dabble in SaaS solutions like CRM.
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Novel New Sales Channels: A small number of CSPs are expected to set up technology centers aimed at SMEs, featuring multi-vendor solutions from the mobile and fixed-line telecom industries to the unified communications, video and cloud services.
With too many IT players offering various technology/software solutions to the SME segment, what are HP's plans to retain its foothold?
In a world where enterprises must constantly react to changing markets, clients are increasingly turning to HP’s Converged Infrastructure (CI) offerings to dramatically improve their agility and optimize costs, allowing IT to provide greater business value. HP extends the benefits of convergence to deliver new levels of speed, simplicity and efficiency that enable clients to capitalize and anticipate change.
HP now has an end-to-end product portfolio – from the network edge to the core of the data center – under a single pane of glass management that increases IT administrator productivity and lowers operational costs.
The company is uniquely-positioned to build on CI, because it is the only company to offer a full portfolio of standards-based, integrated solutions and services developed specifically to solve the complexities of the data center.
We work very closely with our channel partners across the ESSN (Enterprise Servers, Storage, and Networking Group) portfolio to address this market and, over the years, we have invested in an Inside Sales engine to support our partners. We are constantly working with our partners and distributors to drive more demand generation and market coverage activities to address the large total addressable market.
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How does the company address the security concerns of the customers? What are the unique features of HP's various solutions?
SMEs need to implement a comprehensive data protection plan to prevent business downtime and reduce costs associated with data recovery. Many SMEs have large amounts of data on servers running various business applications, databases and operating systems. A shared storage array ensures high availability and improved storage capacity utilization for this data. At the same time, the storage array must be easy to manage and cost effective for SMEs.
HP solutions enable SMEs to store, manage and protect data in a simple, cost-effective manner. They offer improved storage management capabilities and simplified data protection that allow SMEs to focus on innovation rather than managing their technology infrastructure. They often find the cost and complexity of implementing shared storage a barrier to adopting server virtualization.
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The HP StorageWorks P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA) is a software solution that enables them to easily build a storage area network (SAN) for virtual servers without purchasing a physical storage array. The HP StorageWorks P2000 G3 Modular Smart Array family offers high performance and greater storage flexibility at an affordable price. Its simplicity and ease of use is ideal for the growing SMEs that want to deploy equipment today while planning for future capacity and performance requirements.
In addition to this, strategic for CIOs, we have a winning combination of application security products, namely, TippingPoint for networking security; Fortify for application vulnerability/security at development stage and ArcSight for event and information management.
The company says it is focusing on CI competency. Can you elaborate this concept? What about HP's networking solution plans?
HP Converged Infrastructure has helped customers overcome the inflexibility and high costs created by IT sprawl to shift more resources to innovation and strategic initiatives. One of the key learnings from HP CI is in creating an energy-efficient data center that delivers simplicity, integration and automation whereby the IT environment is synergistically aligned to the needs of the business.
This unique approach has helped business accelerate application delivery in a predictable, repeatable way that makes the most efficient use of IT, facility and staff resources to drive business innovation.
Greater exposure to HP sales, channel partners and customers, everyone in the HP ecosystem - from architects to marketing to sales to support - stands behind the HP CI strategy.
To accelerate this engagement with customers and partners, we combined our new networking portfolio with our servers and storage offerings over a year back to form what we call the ESSN division. Our customers today have the unique opportunity to look at our entire portfolio under one roof to address the end-to-end infrastructure needs for their customers who are increasingly looking at converged infrastructure solutions from HP.
