Insight

Intransa on a roll

In the first nine months of 2005, Intransa acquired 35 customers for its IP SAN solutions. Akhtar Pasha examines the company’s prospects in 2006.

"SMBs have concerns about the costs and complexities of deploying and managing fibre channel. IP SAN can help an organisation save on cost and it mitigates complexity. We will soon announce an SMB-specific offering" Vaidyanathan Iyer Country Manager Intransa India Liaison Office

Intransa Inc entered the Indian market in March 2004 on Kumar Malavalli’s suggestion. (Malavalli is a fibre channel technology pioneer and an advisor to the company). Six months later it bagged four key orders. It closed the year with seven customers in its kitty including Wipro Spectramind (now Wipro BPO), L&T (Hazira unit), Satyam Computers and In-Reality (since acquired by Symphony Services).

The next growth phase came in early 2005 when Intransa went through a series of management changes that paid dividends. In the last nine months (starting in the AMJ quarter) the company has won 35 new deals. Says Vaidyanathan Iyer, Country Manager, Intransa India Liaison Office, “2005 was a turnaround year. We bagged key customers such as Spice Telecom, Eicher Motors, Grasim Industries (Aditya Birla Group), HPCL, Flextronics, Rediff, Sun Pharma, Madacom and C-DAC, to name a few.” According to market sources, Intransa has shipped in excess of 260 TB of data, which industry sources say is worth between $2.6 million and $2.75 million.

According to Iyer, “A significant portion of sales in the last nine months came from the IP5000 and IP3000 series. This shows the growing interest and confidence in high- capacity IP SANs. The IP5000 is a fully-redundant configuration whereas the IP3000 is ideal for near-line storage.” Intransa has a wide range of products, and the company is gaining traction in the core of the midrange storage market.

Iyer continues, “Customers can add controller nodes to the storage cluster, gaining host ports, processing power and cache memory in a single system. To increase bandwidth, cache or processing power, just add a controller. Our IP storage systems use an external enclosure for storage, giving customers the ability to add storage capacity independent of the controller nodes. This provides flexibility over storage systems that integrate processors, cache, host ports and capacity in a single enclosure, and is arguably more reliable.”

The company is competing with NetApp which has a different take on IP SAN. George Thomas, Country Manager, India & SAARC, Network Appliance India says, “By combining both NAS and block-based storage onto a single platform, we help the customer choose the protocol that best fits his needs.” NetApp has combined CIFS, NFS, FCP SAN and iSCSI SAN within its filers to support all applications and data types on one platform. Using the same filer, Ethernet network and storage, a customer can have NAS for file sharing and iSCSI SAN support for applications such as databases and e-mail, and manage it all as one system.

Gaining on referrals

Intransa is using customer referrals to win deals. Take the case of Spice Telecom which looked at MphasiS’ deployment of an IP SAN solution from Intransa across five locations in India which lowered the software company’s TCO. MphasiS has consolidated distributed storage resources, provisioned server-independent storage, speeded up backup and restore performance, and significantly enhanced its disaster recovery (DR) preparedness. Kote Gurumurthy, Vice-president of IT at Spice says, “The primary reason for choosing Intransa IP SAN was its cost-effectiveness and deployability. We do not have to invest in a controller every time we buy storage.” Spice is using two IP5000 systems with 2 TB of data each—one for their billing database, which gets replicated into IP SAN at the primary site, and the second for their DR site in Mangalore, which is an exact replica of the primary site in Bangalore. (Spice later referred Intransa’s solution to Medacom in South Africa, which led the latter to go in for Intransa’s IP SAN technology.)

Partners in growth

Much of Intransa’s success has come from its channel partners; they are playing a significant role in winning high-value contracts. Iyer comments, “We have leveraged our partner expertise, and this has led to the acquisition of large customers. For example, HCL Infosystems brought in Eicher Motors, Ramco Systems was responsible for Spice and Flextronics, and Ingram Micro [now Tech Pacific] helped us win the all-important HPCL deal.” Similarly, SES Technologies helped Intransa get orders from L&T and Wipro Spectramind.

Looking ahead

Having built a strong list of customers, will Intransa be able to sustain its success? Iyer is optimistic: “We are poised for quick growth and are going into a ramp-up mode. Businesses are opting for multi-city DR sites, want faster backup and retrieval of data, and wish to reduce storage complexity and ease storage management. To tap the market, we have stepped up our sales operations.”

Intransa has set up a telesales team that will focus on leads being generated. The company is also looking at the SMB market seriously. Iyer analyses, “Since SMBs are tomorrow’s enterprises, their pain-points are the same. They have concerns about costs and the complexities of deploying and managing the fibre channel; this is where IP SAN can bring value and cost savings. [In response], we will soon announce an SMB-specific offering.”

Analysts state that Intransa is an important iSCSI SAN vendor that has successfully taken on two challenges: educating the market on the benefits of iSCSI and the strengths of Intransa. But they also sound a note of caution and say that the challenge for Intransa will be to separate itself from the pack, especially since large storage vendors support iSCSI throughout their product lines. Intransa must make it clear that it is not just another iSCSI storage array vendor, but is instead a company that can drive down the total cost of storage due to scalability and ease of use.

akhtar@expresscomputeronline.com