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Gunning for pole position

India is expected to be EMC's fastest-growing APAC market in 2005, says Atanu Kumar Das

EMC's lowest price-point came down from Rs 25 lakh in 2003 to Rs 3 lakh in 2004. This really proved significant for us as we tapped a lot of segments that were not in our portfolio earlier Manoj Chugh President Emc India and SAARC

For the last 18 months, EMC India has been busy educating enterprise IT users about the value of information. In this regard, its approach has diverged from that of many other IT companies that were busy developing technologies while EMC decided that consumers had to learn how to store information or they would find it very difficult to sustain competition.

Says Manoj Chugh, the company president for India and SAARC, "Today's IT scenario is changing rapidly, and the challenge for every company is to be different from the others. We are trying to make our consumers understand that one has to have an intelligent information infrastructure to sustain competition." EMC believes that companies have to manage data from a single infrastructure with multiple tiers of storage.

As organisations look to access, protect and manage information, it is necessary for them to have intelligent software that understands the value of information and keeps data arranged in such a manner that the user doesn't have to shell out too much money to keep track of old information.

Falling prices

In 2004, EMC saw that the market for NAS solutions grew faster than that for SANs. "The NAS market is growing on account of the fact that enterprises understand that networking and computing are two separate things. This has led them to initiate more spending on NAS," explains Chugh. EMC India grew 100 percent year-on-year in 2003. The company will shortly announce its 2004 results, where India is expected to rank first in the Asia Pacific region in terms of growth. "2004 saw the launch of 17 SAN, NAS and CAS products in two phases. Of these, 11 were dedicated to the enterprise segment. EMC's lowest price-point came down from Rs 25 lakh in 2003 to Rs 3 lakh in 2004. This really proved significant for us as we tapped a lot of segments that were not in our portfolio earlier," Chugh points out.

In 2001, 73 percent of EMC's global revenue came from its hardware division. In 2004, this figure came down to 47 percent with the remainder accruing from software and services. "Software has become integral to organisational productivity everywhere, and the trend is almost the same in India." Every organisation has to take a monthly back-up. This process takes roughly eight hours. EMC developed a piece of software that does the same exercise in eight minutes. "When we performed this back-up process with one of our clients, they understood how much of their productivity was getting hampered every month," says Chugh.

Looking to CAS to grow

EMC hopes that the nascent CAS market will grow over the next two years. Verticals such as medical, financial, banking and insurance are going to adopt this technology. A CAS device lets you protect a document, and it acts like a write-once-read-many times (WORM) drive. "Globally, we have seen huge growth in the CAS market, and India is likely to follow in 2005. Presently we have two CAS products, and this fiscal we will launch a couple more. The lowest-priced CAS product in India is around Rs 60 lakh," Chugh says.

In 2004, one of EMC India's priorities was to expand its reach. In 2003, the company was present only in four cities. After the launch of its new products in February and August 2004, EMC launched a velocity programme to enhance its channel presence. Today, the company has 40 channel partners spread across 11 cities, and expects these numbers to increase considerably in 2005. It has appointed Redington as its sole distributor, and hopes that Redington's reach will help it penetrate more into the country.

Aiming for the top slot

The Indian IT market is growing at a brisk pace, and EMC has also come a long way. Today it is one of the fastest-growing storage vendors in the country, and Chugh wants his company to reach the top this fiscal. "We have done a lot of hard work, and the primary challenge before us is to make the customers understand that storage is different from servers. Most clients are accepting this concept, but there are still many whom we need to enlighten about the different use of storage and servers. This fiscal we hope to make our customers more information-centric, and ensure that they remain ahead of their competitors by managing information intelligently."

atanu@expresscomputeronline.com