Hitachi targets growth from mid-range market

Priya Padmanabhan

BANGALORE: Japanese storage solutions provider Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) is ramping up its sales team in India to cash in on the “phenomenal opportunity” in the country in both the enterprise and mid-range segments.

“We have doubled our sales team in India in the last three months and we will now have 35 employees in India,” said Tom Zack, vice president and general manager, Asia South region.

India is currently the number two (first being China) strategic market for the company. Though China is a much bigger market, Zack considers the Indian market a safer bet because of its continuous and sustainable growth.

Channels handle most of the company's business. Besides an agreement with Ingram Micro, the company has tie-ups with Wipro and Apara. Zack said that the company was hiring people in sales who could work closely with channels.

Hitachi's Bangalore office would also have an application optimized storage solutions center, which would showcase the company's solutions to mid-tier customers. “Usually, mid-tier customers don't have the infrastructure to test and try storage that would suit their needs better,” said Zack.

Hitachi, which is a conservative in investing in markets unlike its main rivals EMC and IBM, initially focused on building referenceable customers in main segments like telecom, banking and financial services and manufacturing, in India.

Zack said that this strategy seems to have paid off with the company now enjoying 35 per cent of the enterprise storage market.

The company plans to market pre-configured bundles involving Microsoft Simple SAN, for the entry-level SME market through its Ingram Micro tie-up.

Zack said that while the focus until recently had been on the enterprise segment, the company is now gearing up to serve the mid-range segment as well. Last year, HDS added on functionalities from its enterprise-class products, such as virtualization, logical partitioning and storage-agnostic universal replication on to its mid-range products.

Thanks to this strategy, in Q3 2005, the company recorded $750 million in revenues - an unprecedented high grosser for the company.

© CyberMedia News