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What kind of trends you see in the storage market in India?
Globally, while information within an organization has been growing at 60 per cent, the overall IT spending has been growing at just 1.2 per cent. This trend is likely to continue till 2012, and the biggest challenge for the CXOs will be to manage the information explosion within their organizations, with lower budgets. Organizations have realized the importance of efficiency and optimization of resources. 
While the situation in India is better, managing costs and scrutinizing ROI is priority for Indian CFOs as well. During 2009, we saw virtualization finding acceptance and it promises to be the biggest opportunity in 2010.
The next step enterprises are considering is to leverage the cloud computing model to optimize further. Enterprises may not move all applications on to the cloud, but will adopt a hybrid model – a mix of on-premise infrastructure and cloud computing. To enable a smooth migration for customers to the cloud computing environment, EMC has collaborated with Cisco and VMware to form the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition. The coalition represents an unprecedented level of collaboration in development, services and partner enablement that “de-risks” the infrastructure virtualization journey of customers to private cloud implementation. Enabled by Vblock Infrastructure Packages, the coalition delivers the industry’s first completely integrated IT offering that combines best of breed virtualization, networking, computing, storage, security, and management technologies with end-to-end vendor accountability.
The other game changing trends include emergence of Solid State Drives (SSDs) and Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) technology. EMC was the first to introduce SSDs in a high-end array. Announced in January 2008, EMC’s Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs) has changed the landscape of the storage industry. EMC uses Enterprise Flash drives in all platforms, as “Tier 0” storage for ultra-fast response times. SSD as a technology while far superior to fibre channel, it is also more expensive today. EMC optimized Enterprise Flash Drives offer up to 30 times greater IOs per second in random read workloads compared to FC hard disk drives. Service times for random I/O are far lower than FC: less than 1 millisecond. Enterprise Flash Drives use 38 per cent less energy per terabyte and 98 per cent less energy per IO.
The new EMC FAST technology, automates the movement of data within a storage system, replacing hours or even days of repetitive, manual storage administrative tasks. As a result, an average system configuration with a combination of EMC FAST technology, enterprise flash drives and SATA disk drives, can deliver higher service levels while reducing storage acquisition costs by at least 20 per cent and lowering storage operational expenses by 40 per cent.
EMC’s FAST technology ensures that the right information is in the right place at the right time and is optimized for both highest performance and lowest cost. It represents a major inflection point in the storage industry and will transform the way information infrastructures are built and used by IT organizations.
In addition to the above-mentioned technologies, we will see Data De-duplication technology adoption amongst Indian enterprises to manage their information storage and backup more efficiently. Traditional backup solutions store data repeatedly and incrementally, expanding total managed storage by 5 to 10 times. Data de-duplication will help address this and deliver an improved return on investment (ROI) by reducing storage infrastructure and management for both backup and archive. At the same time, it also addresses environmental issues by reducing the datacenter footprint for backup along with attendant energy and power savings.
Backup de-duplication can occur in two main places – at the data source or the backup target. The right de-duplication technology and strategy will depend on several factors, including the use case, service level requirements, and what is currently implemented in the environment.
What is your product range to cater to this market?
o Archiving — Create an accessible online archive that lowers operational costs by shrinking backup windows and speeding restores.
Key Products and Solutions:
Hardware: Centera, a simple, scalable, secure storage solution for cost-effective retention, protection, and disposition of a wide range of fixed content.
Software:DiskXtender & EMC SourceOne
o Backup and Recovery — Combine EMC's recovery management offerings, backup technology, and management strategies to fortify your information and assure compliance.
Key Products and Solutions:
Hardware
EMC Disk Library and Data Domain
Software
Avamar & NetWorker &RecoverPoint
o Enterprise Content Management — Use content-enabled solutions to mitigate risk without compromising your ability to harness opportunities.
Captiva,Document Sciences,Documentum,ApplicationXtender and eRoom are good examples
o Intelligent Information Management — Discover, classify, and act on information to significantly lower risks and improve efficiency.
Key Products and Solutions:
DiskXtender and EMC Rainfinity File Virtualization
o IT Management — Leverage automation to take costs out of IT, deliver IT as a true service, and accelerate the journey from physical IT to virtual IT to the cloud.
Infra, Ionix ControlCenter, IT Operations Intelligence and Voyence are the key solutions in this category.
o Replication — Combine the latest in continuous data protection and continuous remote replication technology with the industry's most robust, proven disaster-recovery offerings.
RecoverPoint is a god example here.
o Security — Deploy secure products with built-in capabilities for access control, data protection, secure serviceability and communications, and auditing.
Key Products:
Documentum IRM Services, Documentum Trusted Content Services and Smarts Application Discovery Manager
o Software Development Kit and Driver — Accelerate your time to market by enabling imaging applications to communicate with more than 300 scanners that support the ISIS driver standard.
Key Products: Captiva ISIS Driver and Captiva PixTools
o Storage — Manage more data, more efficiently and keep your information available and secure so that you are ready for growth.
Key Products and Solutions:
Celerra, CLARiiON, Connectrix, EMC Centera, Iomega Products and Symmetrix
o Third-Party Products – EMC Select — Discover best-in-class third-party products to complete your EMC storage, content management, and security solutions.
Host Bus Adaptors (HBAs) and Converged Network Adaptors (CNAs), Mainframe Virtual Tape and Software and Peripherals are key solutions here.
o Virtualization — Simplify information management and improve flexibility for virtual infrastructure with VMWare backup and other EMC virtualization software and solutions.
Virtualization: Rainfinity, Ionix Control Centre, VMware
Which are your most popular products selling in the market?
While we have seen fast growth across our product segments, we believe that EMC Celerra and CLARiiON range of products are very popular in the market.
What is the overall storage market size and EMC’s market share?
As per the recent DQ Top 20 (FY 09) figures, the overall external storage industry (NAS & SAN) is estimated to be a Rs.926-crore market. While EMC doesn’t give out specific market share data, it is a leader in the overall external storage segment (NAS & SAN) in India, according to the DQ research; EMC leads the market with 26-per cent market share in India (FY09).
What is the partner's role in the deployment of products and services?
Partners play a critical role in helping us meet our customers' needs, and we are deeply committed to their success. Our partner programmes are global and comprehensive—designed to provide them with the tools, training, support, and resources that they need to advance their business.
With the need for managing information increasing, what is required is the right product portfolio to manage growth, reduce cost and improve efficiencies in their IT infrastructures. This presents a huge opportunity for channel partners with technologies like cloud computing, virtualization, de-duplication, and unified storage taking the centre stage.
The EMC Velocity² Partner Programme, which supports EMC’s channel strategy, is focussed on developing a balanced portfolio of motivated, loyal and self-sufficient partners by delivering a robust programme with rich financial rewards and providing partners with the opportunity to accelerate their profitability with EMC.
In fact, in 2009 for the third consecutive year EMC has been named by Everything Channel’s 2009 Annual Report Card (ARC) as the Company of the Year in the Network Storage and Storage Software categories. For 24 years, the ARC Awards have recognized outstanding partner programmes and superb vendor service.
What kind of margins/ benefits do partners get? What are their pain points?
EMC does not share specifics of margins that channel partners are offered. That said, the EMC Velocity Partner Programme is comprised of tiers that provide incremental business benefits and rewards to partners based on their revenue, training, and accreditation achievements. The tiers, with graduated benefits, are Associate, Advantage, Premier, and Signature. Velocity Partner loyalty and performance are directly linked to increased financial rewards for those that achieve higher levels of proficiency and increase their revenue contribution to move up in the tier structure.
What are the opportunities for channel partner?
As mentioned earlier, there is a huge opportunity for channel partners with evolving Information Infrastructure requirements of enterprises and evolving technologies in the areas of cloud computing, virtualization, de-duplication, and unified storage.
EMC is committed to making sure its partners have the best portfolio of offerings to solve a wide-range of customer’s IT challenges, can efficiently complete transactions, are rewarded for selling EMC solutions, and have services opportunities to increase partner profitability. In the past year, we have delivered new industry-leading storage and backup, recovery and archive software products, enhanced deal registration and incentive programmes to provide financially superior rewards, streamlined training for services delivery partners and provided marketing campaigns to help partners take advantage of business continuity and virtualization market opportunities. As partner needs evolve, EMC remains focussed on having all the elements of its Velocity² Partner Programme aligned to meet market demands and opportunities.
How do you manage after-sales support?
After-sales service is possibly the most important piece for customers today as their information infrastructure assets become more and more complex due to technology innovation in storage. The storage strategy has evolved from consolidation, to virtualization and is now moving to next level with cloud computing. It is not only about technology deployment today but also about helping enterprise manage these assets and migrate.
EMC three levels of support for its products/ technologies – basic, enhanced, and premium – enable customers to choose the support option that is right for their organization's information criticality.
Sanjay Hasija
Executive Director
Trifin Technologies (P) Ltd.
Trifin Technologies was founded in 1996 and today has over 14 years of rich experience as IT products and service provider with annual revenues exceeding Rs.36 million (US$8 million ending FY 2009). As far as the market trend is concerned, we are witnessing
• Gradual transition in terms of storage requirements and needs
• Mid-size customers talking more about Virtualization, Disaster Recovery and looking at SAN more seriously
• Large enterprises settling in for archiving
Products dealt in for EMC:
We focus on three core areas for dealing in products offered by EMC, namely storage (SAN, NAS), Archiving and Backup recovery Systems. We have a strong team for handling e-mail archiving at Trifin and we are also looking after many projects initiated by EMC. Of late, we have gone into doing deeper business for Iomega as well.
SAN has emerged as the leader in storage space and as the best archiving solutions. We have consolidated ourselves in e-mail archiving.
Role in selling Products and Services:
• Our expertise in offering email-archiving, Avamar and data deduplication can be well mentioned
• We provide end-to-end archiving solutions to our customers
Benefits/ Margins earned:
The relationship fetches us a lot of respect and credibility in the market. It also gives us lots of tools for offering value-added services to our customers.
Our margin is always in the double digit.
Importance of After-Sales Service Support:
After-sales service support is a key factor which helps us in associating ourselves with our customers and also maintaining a cordial relationship with them. The customer feedbacks and reports from time to time are of great help to us in doing good business. Our slow approach to reach and know the customers is our greatest strength and EMC has always been a very supporting principal towards the same.
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