“REV does away with the limitations of tape drives”

Iomega recently launched its REV drive, a portable storage device targeted at the SME segment. The drive is the company’s first product based on the Removable Rigid Disk technology, and is said to be a better alternative than back-up devices like tape drives. Sanjeev Gupta, senior manager for business development at Iomega Pacific, speaks to CHITRA PADMANABHAN

Why are you targeting SMEs with the REV drive?

The enterprise segment in India is gradually moving towards high-end storage, while the small business segment is exploring better storage alternatives. When you look closely look at the SME segment, tape drives emerge as the basic storage medium. In tape drives data is stored in a sequential manner, which has inherent limitations in terms of feature enhancement. With this segment as the key focus, Iomega decided to launch a portable storage device for sharing and archiving large files. The REV drive has the reliability of a hard drive and offers a better data transfer rate. The drive is designed to do away with the limitations of tape drives, which are relatively fragile and slow. Though there are portable hard drives in the market, these devices are not consumed in huge volumes. For instance, companies are not open to the idea of buying multiple portable hard drives, but the same companies would definitely look at purchasing a fairly large volume of REV drives because they cost less than half of most competing tape products.

Would there be any change in the channel strategy for launching the REV drive?

Iomega has always been a channel-driven company and will continue to be so. We have three distributors: Tech Pacific, Ingram Micro and Neoteric. REV drives require a solution-selling approach. We are in the process of conducting training programmes for our channel partners who deal with end-users. This is because—unlike CD or DVD writers, which are essentially generic products—REV drives come with automated back-up software and storage software. Small businesses get an option to do away with additional investments on storage-related software. Our target customers include small organisations, professionals in the audio-visual media who have to regularly carry out back-ups of large files, engineers and consultants who manage CAD/CAM and GIS data, and healthcare professionals who need to archive patient records and transfer large medical images. We have launched this product simultaneously in the US, Philippines, Thailand and the Middle East. However, our target audience varies from country to country. For example, globally the REV drives will be targeted at the home user, while in India the audience is the SME segment. This is because in India a home user cannot relate to the idea of using portable high-end back-up devices.

Can you elaborate on the OEM strategy for the REV drive?

Major PC OEMs are currently evaluating REV drives for use in servers and business desktop systems. These are products that often ship without high-capacity back-up due to the high cost of tape. A lot of SMEs are currently purchasing customised servers from value added resellers (VARs) and system integrators. We plan to tap this market by closely working with them and highlighting the advantages of using REV drives. We are in the process of expanding our contacts with VARs and OEMs, and building a parallel selling channel, which is a direct route to the vast base of SMEs in the Indian market.