"We want to accelerate our product lines through partnerships in India."

Rick Belluzzo, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Quantum Corporation talks to Prashant L Rao about his mission to reinvent Quantum, how he improved operational efficiencies and why the company exited the NAS business.

* You had a mission to transform Quantum from a disk drive company to one that's a major player in tape automation and data protection appliances. Do you believe that you've fulfilled that part of your vision for Quantum?

We'e on our way. The focus is upon backup, recovery and archival. From tape libraries, we are moving to disk. I would say that the vision is 50 percent complete. We continue to build on our disk-based products; there are more enhancements in the roadmap including 2:1 compression using the same technology as in our tape drives. Other enhancements will be related to redundancy and availability and ILM related stuff.

* What measures did you implement when you joined Quantum to improve operational efficiencies and cut costs?

We've been a bit of a complex company. We did about six acquisitions. Over the last year we have been integrating, improving efficiency, doing R&D and introducing products. We saved 12 million dollars per quarter compared to the previous 18 months. Quantum outsourced manufacturing and spun off the NAS business.

* When you spun off the NAS appliance division were you looking to focus on Quantum's core competence in data backup and protection? Looking at the explosive growth of NAS would you have taken that decision if you'd known how things would turn out?

We knew what was going to happen. We were mostly at the low end. The big players such as HP and Dell were promoting that market. With commoditisation by Microsoft, making money in that business is tough for a company our size.

* With DLTSage you've built some degree of 'intelligence' into your tape libraries. Where do you see that going in the next couple of years? How 'smart' are tape and disk-based solutions going to get in the mid-term?

e-talk is a Web-based tool that communicates with a drive. We are working to improve tape reliability. In the future, disk and tape will increasingly work as partners. Disk is the performance component and tape is the cost component. Capacity becomes more important over time, that's one theory.

Today, you use Veritas software to connect a DX100 to a tape library. Over time we'll be developing the software to do that.

* What are your plans for India? Do you intend to set up an Indian subsidiary? Most MNC players are doing a lot of R&D in India. Does Quantum intend to set up an R&D centre in India in the next twelve to eighteen months?

We are expanding our local presence. India is one of the few markets in the APAC where we want to increase our presence. We are working to set up a sales and marketing subsidiary. Over the next year we'll be doing R&D in India. We want to accelerate our product lines through partnerships in India. The R&D in India will be primarily software-based. We do not have plans for support from India. Most of our support is through partners and at customer sites.

* Where is data backup and protection technology headed in the next couple of years?

From a customer perspective they are dealing with lots of issues. The big trend here is how you provide a set of seamless choices to customers for ILM. Less manual intervention is the way ahead. We need to make tape better. It's great to push capacity and performance. There's an opportunity with things like DLTSage and Mako, to build more intelligence and buy capacity in increments. Disk will play a more important role. Drive prices are dropping. Enterprises are putting disk arrays in front of tape libraries. It's about making the pieces work together. Today we are working on software to make the DX emulate a tape drive. Metadata software will eliminate backup as we know it. With it you don't have a backup process, you make duplicate copies.

* Do you plan to hit a billion dollars in turnover this year?

We are going for value in the short term. We have shrunk the company to deliver better margins. It is easy to grow but hard to make money. The industry is commoditised, we sell more but that doesn't create shareholder value. That takes longer.