30 minute interview

“We need to break the link between server technology and storage”

Steve Coad General Manager EMC South Asia

You are coming up with newer initiatives such as EMC Express Solutions in the SMB space. What are your related plans for Indian SMBs?

We want to capture the commercial SMB space in India. We will increase our geographical coverage this year by opening offices starting with Kolkata and Chennai, where we will handle pre-sales, sales and post-sales of EMC’s solutions. The Kolkata office is already operational.

Our second initiative will be growing our partner reach. We currently have 15 cities covered, and are targeting 36 cities by 2005-end. We intend to reach second-tier cities (B&C-class cities) with this approach.

We also plan to increase the specialisation and skill levels of our existing Indian partners. This will help them provide greater value to users. It will be done through online courses, and training at our solutions labs at Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai.

How will your products/solutions be packaged for SMBs?

Initially, we are coming out with solutions built around Microsoft Exchange. We are also launching other bundles built around applications such as SAP. This will enable us to position EMC technology in the commercial SMB space.

What is the addressable market that EMC is looking to tap in India?

EMC is only in external storage, and this segment is divided into DAS, SAN and NAS. According to IDC figures, it means that we are looking at $130 million of external storage in India. EMC is only in NAS/SAN, and we have become prominent in India since the past five quarters.

What is EMC’s present share in the Indian storage market?

As of January 2005, we had 106 customers, and we plan to end the quarter with a much higher number. We have started from top enterprise levels, and we expect it to escalate as the lower enterprise segments start higher adoption.

Does this also include the iSCSI marketshare?

The iSCSI market is not the typical market that EMC is in. iSCSI is just another connectivity option for our customers. As long as they are not expecting high performance from it, this is an economical option for the SMBs because price is important to them.

This is where the importance of segmentation comes in. We are going to see increased marketshare as we have more products, solutions and software for SMBs than ever before.

What are the challenges that you face in India?

One of the things EMC needs to do here is break the link between the server technology and storage vendor. It is today easy for a server vendor such as IBM, HP or Sun to play down the importance of storage. In this manner, the server vendor over-emphasises the server and underplays the role of storage.

It is up to us to educate end-users on the benefits of looking at storage as an individual resource. Considering storage as an independent resource will enable users to break down their storage silos and start viewing consolidation and virtualisation of resources to save money. Then they can also look at common strategies around backup, archival, disaster recovery, etc.

You mentioned training for the partners. What’s the progress on this initiative?

We have already started training in the southern region. It includes the technical, pre-sales and post-sales staff of EMC partners. We are rolling it out geographically. We host, train and test them over 48 hours. In addition, ongoing online training complements this.

In a competitive market such as India, many of our partners resell competing gear as well. Few partners sell only EMC equipment. If we skill them and demonstrate the functionality and product richness of our technologies, they will be more effective. This also means that they will recommend it to our users as they are personally convinced. In addition, we are encouraging our partners and pre-sales and sales people to become EMC-proven professionals.

— Anil Patrick