30 minute interview

“Disk-to-disk backup is 2-3 times faster than conventional backup”

Is disk-to-disk backup a significant opportunity?

Emil Kobylarz Managing Director, Asia Pacific Quantum

Customers are realising that the smarter way to do backups faster and reduce the backup window is by investing in disk-to-disk backups. This results in a reduced backup and restore time due to faster disk-to-disk data transfer speeds. Disks-to-disk backups shrink backup and retrieval time—they are 2-3 times as fast as conventional backup devices. As per a report from the Taneja Group, customers who implement a Quantum DX Virtual Tape Library experience, on the average, a 400 percent increase in their restore performance, and their backup performance goes up by 200 percent. We see a big opportunity in India, both in the enterprise and SMB market. We have found that customers with SAN, NAS and direct-attached storage environments are all examining disk-based solutions. Disk-based backups are suited for disaster recovery, e-mail and archiving. We recently won a customer in the BFSI space for our disk-to-disk backup solution. Tape drive-based solutions employ sequential recording methods and are slower when compared to disk-based solutions.

Has Wipro been instrumental in your wins over here?

Our relationship with Wipro dates back to 2002, when we tied up with them for our ALT product line. Wipro has been instrumental in getting us enterprise accounts. Additionally, since it offers end-to-end storage solutions to the enterprise—product, integration and support—it becomes imperative for us to go with them. Through Wipro, we have able to get some big accounts such as Texas Instruments, Vijaya Bank, Union Bank, ABN Amro and Bank of America. Business-wise, our relationship with Wipro is significant—we get 65 percent of our Indian revenues from it.

You have taken your relationship with Wipro one step forward. Can you share some details?

We are outsourcing product development to Wipro for our entry-level DX-Series disk-to-disk backup solution. It is difficult for us to get the best engineering talent, but that gap is filled by Wipro as they have the required skill-sets. Its expertise in developing feature enhancements is helping us gain efficiencies. Outsourcing product development to Wipro gives us a 24-hour development process advantage, and this lets us accelerate product development and incorporate some advanced features so that we can bring products to the marketplace faster. Wipro is working on hardware-based compression to double the capacity. Our engagement with it is to reduce the overall product development cycle, and the DX-Series development has since become twice as fast.

Will you outsource more work to Indian companies?

In addition to engineering services, we feel there are other aspects in services which will benefit from outsourcing. To this end we are outsourcing our global support calls to India for low-end products. Currently, we are outsourcing global support to vCustomer based out of Pune.

How does the Certance acquisition help Quantum?

We have purchased all of Certance’s assets, including Travan, DDS / DAT (Digital Data Storage / Digital Audio Tape), and LTO Ultrium-format technology products. These will complement our current portfolio of DLTape drives, a DAT-72 autoloader, and a disk-to-disk-to-tape appliance for small and medium businesses. In terms of market positioning, Certance’s technology fits below our DX series. Now all of the bases are covered—from entry level through the highest performance, highest capacity.

What are Quantum India’s marketing plans?

We had nine people in the engineering and sales team, and have recently added another four. Historically we have focussed on the enterprise market. The acquisition of Certance gives us the opportunity to focus on the volume market (entry-level tape drivers). Large enterprises are buying small auto-loaders and stand-alone tape drivers for their remote locations. We are ready with our reseller channel network of Ingram Micro and Redington. With the acquisition of Tech Pacific by Ingram, we will have a larger network for selling our newly-acquired volume products.

—Akhtar Pasha