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Spotlight
Sanat: ‘S’ is for storage
Incubated as a company for the networked storage space, Sanat
Technologies intends to make its mark in this segment, reports Renuka Vembu
 Sanat
Technologies was incorporated by Vasan V S, a BITS Pilani graduate and Shankar
Raman, a post graduate from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. They
used their decade and a half of experience to start Sanat in May 2006. Vasan
comes with 16 years in the IT industry, his longest tenure being with Cisco
Systems in various product engineering divisions and also headed the Storage
technology practice of one of the top five Indian IT service companies. Shankar
Raman has around 17 years of industry experience. He too was employed with Cisco
Systems in various product engineering functions. Raman holds a couple of patents
in his domain of security, wireless and networking. The motivation to be the
only Indian company in the storage space, and to show the world that Indians
are not only technocrats but can be great entrepreneurs, led them to build Sanat.
Incubation stages
The company conducted exhaustive research and developed a
robust firmware for NAS and IP SAN during its initial two years. In July 2007,
sales initiatives were kicked off. Ramani V, Country Manager – Sales and
Marketing, Sanat Technologies, said, “Just like any start-up fighting for
its share in the market, Sanat Technologies did have its share of challenges
which were:
- It was a new entity and there was no branding.
- It had no reference customers at that point in time.
- The company had to tie up with channel partners
(value added resellers) to take its solution to the market.
- It had to impress its vision and its commitment
to be in the storage arena upon its customers and partners.
| Manufacturing
and retail |
UniverCell and
Anand Automotive group |
| IT and ITES |
Covansys (Bangalore), Value
Labs (Hyderabad), KG group Coimbatore, Arctern (Bangalore, Mumbai and Hyderabad) |
| Education and research |
IIT Chennai, NIT Tiruchi,
Jamia University, Shankara Nethralaya Chennai |
| Government |
Central Command Lucknow,
Southern Railways, Dept. of Atomic Energy |
Business approach
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 "On
a personal level we would rate Arctern, a BPO in Bangalore, as one
of our good wins and a memorable
one because it was tough getting the customer's mind share especially
when they were keen on HP or IBM"
- Ramani V
Country Manager - Sales and Marketing, Sanat Technologies
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The company is engaged in providing storage solutions to the
mid-market and to SMBs. To this end it has adopted a reseller-based business
model with direct interactions with the customer, right from the initial sale
to after sales service. Ramani V revealed, “We give the utmost importance
to customers and partner training programs because this, in turn, takes care
of the right solution being pitched. We also have a sales model where we allow
any of the partners/ OEM players to build their own NAS and IP SAN solutions
by procuring our firmware and using it with hardware of their own. We also have
tied up with a few players abroad in this manner who have entered into an OEM
relationship with us.”
Client base
Sanat has it presence across industry verticals like manufacturing and retail,
IT/ ITES, education and research and government. It has a client base of around
55 customers in cities like Delhi, Gurgaon, Lucknow, Pune, Hyderabad, Bangalore,
Coimbatore, Tiruchi, etc with sales offices in Chennai and Bangalore, and new
ones in Mumbai and Delhi will be opened up by September 2008. Sanat works through
Channel Partners, Sis and VARs.
With a wide presence across locations and verticals, for
all technical contacts, it interacts with clients directly and conducts periodic
customer engagement training programs on enhanced features and new offerings.
It has fine-tuned its OS for the needs of verticals such as BPO, IP surveillance
and semiconductors. All this has been possible because it has developed the
firmware in India and it has been easy for the company to make customer-centric
modifications.
Prominent projects
Ramani V said, “All our wins are memorable as all of our customers are
important to us. Having said this, on a personal level, we would rate Arctern,
a BPO based in Bangalore, as one of our good wins. It is memorable because it
was tough getting mindshare with this particular customer especially when they
were keen on HP or IBM. We did a lot of things right in this win because we
gave preference to the customer interest. We pitched the Sanat Instor600 and
explained the advantages of having a unified storage solution. The USP of Sanat
to do a flat file level automatic backup from desktops and laptops was leveraged
to the core.”
Post this implementation in Bangalore, the company bagged orders from Mumbai
and Hyderabad too. The company points out several important factors that have
helped them in their ventures:
- A one-stop solution for block and file level data
(improving ROI at a lesser TCO).
- Its backup software with the NAS which eliminates
costly software for backup from third party vendor who charge based on the
number of desktops.
- A scalable solution considering long term investments.
The team
There are ten individuals in the development team and a dozen are in support,
pre-sales, testing, as well as in sales and marketing. Ramani V said, “We
believe that any organization in its growth phase has to have extensive interaction
and gel well as a team. We at Sanat Technologies have an organizational structure
that encourages the same and at the same time each employee has well-defined
role and responsibilities thanks to the vision and leadership of the founders.”
On the anvil
The company aims to achieve a distinct market share in the networked storage
space, and is gunning for around 300 installations by December 2009. It is launching
its Disaster Recovery Replication Suite for storage-based replication by around
September, and is already working on the release of an ILM Solution by December
2008.
renuka.vembu@expressindia.com
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