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HDS inside

Hitachi Data Systems India is focussing on SMBs, says Venkatesh Ganesh

Storage services is a high growth area and is relatively untapped by the majority of storage players P Subramanian Country Manager HDS India

Few know that Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) India designed and implemented the first SAN solution in the country. Tata Infotech passed on the lead to HDS while it looked at systems integration. Today, apart from its own SAN and NAS solutions, HDS has an OEM agreement with the likes of HP and Sun. HP’s high-end array technology is from HDS.

Realising that India would emerge as a big market, HDS began to take a methodical approach to selling its products. It started by identifying SI partners such as Wipro Infotech and Apara. Simultaneously, HDS India identified a list of 100 potential customers. It partnered Wipro to take care of the distribution, integration and support for its products. While HDS has been operating primarily through its channel partners, 2004 saw a major initiative when it formed a local subsidiary. The company has customers such as VSNL, HDFC Bank, Infosys, TCS, IDBI and Intel.

Hitachi has a SMB SAN offering called ‘Starter SAN’ which includes pre-configured storage systems and components from known vendors. The goal is to simplify SAN for SMBs. Every component in the SAN comes with relevant software for simplifying implementation. With these starter SAN solutions, Hitachi is looking to encourage its channel partners to sell to SMBs. The competition for starter SAN solutions is going to be tough for HDS India. IBM is the most successful player in the entry-level market, selling about 15 such systems every month. In India HDS has ten clients using its starter SAN solutions.

How is HDS’ offering different from those of its competitors? Explains the Country Manager of HDS India, P Subramanian, “We will focus on providing flexible storage solutions to SMBs. They can start by meeting their requirements with a particular product when they are small; as they grow, they can add a higher-end box.”

Subramanian mentions the mid-range Thunder Series to prove his point. “An SMB can start with the 9520 and upgrade to 9530.” The 9520 and 9530 series are aimed at the SMB segment, the Thunder 9570 and 9585 at the mid-size market, and the Lightning 9900 at the enterprise segment. The most popular product in India is the Thunder 9520. The SMB segment contributes about 40 percent of HDS’ revenues in here; this is expected to rise to 60 percent by 2006.

HDS India has identified four pillars of growth: modular storage, SAN solutions, NAS and GSS (Global Solution Services). Under GSS, the company provides product-based services, storage solutions services and industry solutions. The storage solutions services category includes services such as integration, business continuity and disaster recovery.

Subramanian says, “Storage services is a high growth area and is relatively untapped by the majority of storage players.” The GSS initiative includes about 45 pre-packaged services with offerings complemented from other industry players.

Another product that HDS is banking on is TagmaStore, a platform that allows enterprises to connect storage products from different vendors. Enterprises having different storage products can use this platform to manage and provision storage. TagmaStore plays a key part in the company’s ILM and storage software strategy. The company has four Indian clients for this platform. Explains Subramanian, “Storage should be optimised and provisioned based on applications. Our storage platform allows allocation of storage resources as per the application needs.”

On the NAS front, HDS’ does not sell NAS devices separately. It plays with an integrated approach. For example, customers can plug in NAS blades to HDS’ storage platform and use it as a NAS device. Subramanian says that this approach helps customers reduce the cost of managing storage by one-third as compared to what they would incur by using competing solutions.

HDS is bullish on storage area management (SAM) as most large enterprises have already invested heavily in implementing SANs. With the basic infrastructure in place, enterprises are now looking to derive more value from their existing SAN investments by deploying SAM.

It has been a good run for the company as it has doubled its customer base in India from 45 in 2003 to 90 in 2004. It aims to increase this to 150 in 2005.

venkatesh@expresscomputeronline.com