'India is a key growth market for Quantum'

How has the last quarter been for Quantum in Asia Pacific region? More specifically, India?

Our business continues to grow quarter on quarter and we are seeing particular strength in India, China and Korea. We have invested in infrastructure in India and will continue to add resource in the coming months. Our key business partners, Wipro and Apara, continue to develop significant storage solution opportunities for us in the Indian market.

India is a key growth market for Quantum. In the last year, Quantum Storage Solutions Group (SSG) has doubled its Indian operation, and will further add regional coverage in New Delhi and Mumbai in the coming months.

We are one of the few automation manufacturers that have invested in local engineering capability to provide direct support along with the trained and certified engineers of our reseller/integration partners.

Highly effective customer support is another key focus area for us. We import spares, pay the customs duty and carry stock in our warehouse in Bangalore. This means that we are able to offer a superior level of support to our customers - they do not have to wait for parts from overseas or deal with the logistical issues of importing replacement parts. In a nutshell, we want to make it easy for our Indian customers to do business with us.

APAC is running at approximately 15 percent of FY2002 sales.

According to IDC, by 2005 the SAN and NAS market in India will be worth an estimated $81 million and $53 million respectively. We expect continued growth overall in the region with particular contribution from Korea, China and India.

Our strategic plan is to double our APAC business by March 2004.

Whilst we continue to look at other business areas either directly or through acquisitions, our current business model is based on hardware and I am unaware of any changes to that for the balance of this fiscal year.

Quantum’s DLTtape Group has recently outsourced its current tape drive manufacturing to Jabil Circuit. Outsourcing to Jabil will enable Quantum’s DLTtape Group to reduce costs and more efficiently focus its resources on developing and delivering innovative products, while maintaining the high quality of Quantum’s tape drives.

Jabil is Quantum’s largest and highest-rated supplier of tape drive components and has an extensive base of electronic component suppliers for inventory, manufacturing and logistics management.

Under the terms of the outsourcing agreement, Jabil will utilize Quantum’s manufacturing facility in Penang, Malaysia, and purchase raw materials, work-in-process production inventory and production fixed assets from Quantum. Jabil will hire the majority of Quantum’s current employees at the facility and continue manufacturing Quantum’s tape drive products there. From the point of view of Quantum’s customers, the transition will be seamless.

In addition, as part of the agreement with Jabil, Quantum will outsource the manufacturing of some tape automation products, which are currently made at Quantum’s Penang facility. As a result, Quantum’s SSG customers will also benefit from the enhanced manufacturing efficiencies and continued high-quality production provided by Jabil.

These decisions enable us to reduce costs and more efficiently focus our resources while maintaining our high quality. By outsourcing our manufacturing, we are able to enhance our competitiveness in the marketplace, leverage our cost savings to focus our resources and engineering talents to deliver innovative, reliable products for our customers' growing needs.

However, to ensure that the highest quality products continue to be delivered to customers, the manufacturing process will remain consistent, as will the factory and many current employees. We will utilize the same facility, equipment, manufacturing systems and operators. We have also put a Quality Team in place in Singapore, including (four) full-time continuation engineers and (two) quality service managers to maintain real-time responsiveness to the process. Jabil will also implement all existing Quantum methods, criteria and reporting requirements for testing and quality control processes.

DLTtape technology is the industry’s most widely adopted tape platform and the de facto standard for mid-range tape backup and archiving data.  DLTtape technology is sold by all server OEMs and tape automation suppliers and used by 98 percent of Fortune 500 companies.

With an installed base of over 1.65 million drives and more than 68 million DLTtape media cartridges, DLTtape technology is the first mainstream tape technology to announce a plan that will achieve over one terabyte (TB) of uncompressed storage capacity on a single cartridge, along with a transfer rate of over 100 megabytes per second (MB/sec) and that too in just over 3 hours.

Innovative technologies built into the new Super DLT products assures that Quantum DLTtape technology will continue to be the leader in mid-range backup solutions.

LTO has been relatively successful in some markets, however the lack of compatibility between manufacturers, a delayed road map and the technical advantages offered by SDLT 320 positions Quantum squarely as market leader and offers a very bright future for growth.

Lack of education at the integrator/reseller level and also at the end-user level could be some reasons why disaster recovery and data security solutions have not been implemented in a big way. Another major reason could be the customer’s concern for implementing solutions that not only provide scalability but also ensure long-term investment protection.

For instance, in India we have been selling a large number of M-1500 series libraries, which provide modular scalability for companies that need a backup solution that can grow and change as their data grows and backup requirements change. Frankly, it is exactly these kinds of flexible and customer centric solutions from Quantum that will boost the storage market in a big way.