'In India, companies are keen on owning assets'

BANGALORE, INDIA: All over the world, there has been a huge shift in dynamics in the data center space, especially in recent times. As a matter of fact, massive consolidation efforts are taking place as far as adoption of virtualized environments and cloud-based solutions are concerned, says Michael Cremen, senior vice-president, Global Markets, Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS).

A wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., HDS announced earlier this year its strategy of enabling data center transformation through IT solutions that are virtualized, automated, cloud-ready and sustainable.

The company's focus, Cremen says, is "relating technology to business value. We are keen on helping our customers leverage their resources and utilize them effectively, thereby offering them overall data center transformation solutions".

According to him, the company is into devising product strategy for customers to cost-effectively re-architect the data center and optimize existing IT assets to support various cloud delivery models.

He, however, concedes that the generic adoption trend in India is slightly slower than some other markets. "Here, companies want to own assets. Hence, there are private clouds, but not much of shared clouds."

Yet, the company has been witnessing remarkable growth in the country primarily through its Global System Integrators (GSI) programme and attracting investments in the virtualization and overall data center ecosystem. According to Cremen, over the last one-and-a-half years, there have been a lot of positive changes among System Integrators (SIs) in the country.

"As a result, customers are saving the equivalent of millions of dollars in storage costs and are experiencing data center reliability and availability benefits that far surpass competitive offerings," he says.

Under the GSI, the company has handpicked a set of partners in all regions where it has a presence. "Our GSI partnership programme encourages SIs to understand customer issues and sell solutions instead of technologies. Built around key elements like engagement and enablement, the programme has been very successful in India through leading SIs such as Infosys, Wipro and HCL," says Cremen.

It is these SI partnerships that have played a crucial role in changing the perception of the company as a pure play storage vendor to a comprehensive business solutions provider.

Cremen points out that HDS intends to develop industry-based solutions based on the needs of different verticals. The GSI programme enables mutual access to global accounts to either parties involved in a particular partnership.

HDS is also banking heavily on the Financial Services and Insurance (FSI) domain. "It is the biggest vertical for us. In the telecoms sector, too, a lot of convergence is on. Basically, it's about how the customer is going to handle exploding and evolving content in video and otherwise," explains Cremen.

The company also caters to pharmaceutical, healthcare and manufacturing sectors in facilitating their data center operations.