CAS to drive growth

EMC, with revenues of $9.66 billion in 2005 and approximately 26,500 employees worldwide, is a provider of products, services and solutions for data storage and management. It currently has around 350 customers in India, 250 of which are in the storage space. As the data storage industry celebrates its 50th anniversary, Manoj Chugh, EMC’s president for India and SAARC, shared with Pragati Simlote, his thoughts on EMC’s storage journey over the years, the current market trends and what to look forward in future. Excerpts:  

What are some of the milestones that EMC has achieved during it journey?  

Storage systems have become intelligent, open and are available in different flavors since the last 50 years. The first major landmark in the data storage history was the advent of open storage. EMC introduced Symmetrix 3000, world’s first platform-independent data storage systems for open systems market. This system could not only connect to IBM, but also to open systems simultaneously.  

The second point in the data storage history is with storage arrays supporting high capacities. From the world’s first 1 terabyte system being announced in 1995, storage arrays now have a capacity of 1 petabyte of data.  

Another milestone in EMC’s journey was the creation of the Interoperability Lab. In 2000, we unveiled our E-Infostructure Interoperability Program and opened the world’s largest Interoperability Lab for data storage area networks.  

When I joined EMC in 2003, the size of the Indian data storage market was modest and a majority of it was DAS, around 53 per cent, and the rest was networked data storage. Within two years, there was a 40-point shift in the data storage market. Networked data storage captured around 83 per cent of the market with DAS constituting the rest. This was a big contribution of EMC to the data storage market and I give 100 per cent credit to EMC for making this shift.  

How has EMC grown in India? What is your growth strategy going forward?  

EMC has experienced tremendous growth in the Indian market over the last three years. The recent announcement to increase Indian investment to $500 million to grow the information management market and expand the sales and marketing infrastructure was a significant step in the direction of accelerating this growth.  

Over a period of time, EMC has transformed from a data storage company to an information management company to an information structure company helping customers to execute on ILM (Information Lifecycle Management). As customers’ information assets increase, they realize that information is the key. This is true for mid-tier organizations also. Requirements of a mid-tier organization are not functionally different from that of a large one, but the scale of implementation may differ.  

EMC has been focusing on SMBs for a long time. What are your recent initiatives in this regard?  

We have recently launched an enhanced EMC Velocity Partner Program, the EMC Velocity SMB Partner Program, to resell our newly introduced EMC Insignia line of SMB products.  

The recently launched EMC Insignia line of software and hardware products enable SMBs store, manage, protect and share their vital business information. Additionally, we have also appointed Select Technologies as a distributor for EMC Insignia products. Redington has expanded its EMC portfolio to include the EMC Insignia products. 

EMC has recently announced plans to double its investment in India? What are your plans going forward?  

We recently announced doubling our existing investments in India by 2010 from $250 million announced in February 2005, to over $500 million. We would set up a Center of Excellence in e-Governance (CoEE) to assist the Central and State Governments with their e-Governance information management and storage needs. EMC's additional investment in India will be used to grow the Indian market for information management, expand the sales and marketing infrastructure and strengthen R&D presence in India. Currently we are present in 30 cities (with over 50 partners) and plan to increase our reach to 60 cities by 2008.

 Which segments are you betting on for growth: high-end or mid-tier?  

The mid-tier segment constitutes around 60 per cent of the Indian data storage market. Indian market is unique and has different requirements, and EMC is working on making products available to meet the mid-tier requirements. Even at the high-end of the market, there is still tremendous potential for growth in the data storage arena. The data storage growth in India would also be driven by the growth in various sectors like telecom, government, banking and manufacturing.  

Currently, SAN and NAS would continue to drive volume and numbers and going forward content addressed storage (CAS) would be a big driver.  

What is the road ahead for EMC?

 Mid-tier market is an important aspect for EMC and we are aiming to address it in innovative ways. We are also working on the deployment of the next phase, the ILM (networked data storage being the first one) as the market is heading towards application specific ILM in the near future.  

Some of the major growth drivers for data storage in future include disaster recovery/business continuity, enterprise content management, e-mail management, CAS, IP-based data storage, data storage virtualization and growth in mobile applications.  

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