ChannelWorld.in, Strategic insights for solution providers

VENUGOPAL: For the past nine years, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has been providing storage offerings in India. In 2010, we intend to increase coverage in terms of direct resources and to expand our partner portfolio. With offices in Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi, we now plan to have direct presence in Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkata.

VENUGOPAL: HDS has a good blend of distributors, SIs, and resellers in India. We intend to double our VAR base in the next twelve months by adding two to three VARs across each region. We intend to enhance repeat business through these VARs by leveraging each other’s core competences. These VARs will be engaged with customers through collaboration solutions, virtualization, storage consolidation, data protection, and other solutions. Apart from top SIs like Wipro, HCL, and CMC who pursue a solutions-based approach for our offerings, we also align with tier II SIs.

VENUGOPAL:The value of data is increasing, while the cost of storage is reducing amidst ‘almost flat’ budgets at enterprises. Most customers have bought specific storage technologies to solve a particular business need. This leads to more resources, greater management complexities, and an inability to share resources. A single platform for all data storage makes better business sense for enterprises today.

The Service Oriented Storage Solutions architecture has the capability to reuse resources and the abstraction layer helps simplify complexities. Our storage solutions enable heterogeneous storage to be dynamically provisioned according to business needs and centrally managed via Hitachi storage virtualization software. An integrated platform helps customers save around 20 to 25 percent of overall storage costs.

VENUGOPAL:Customers today are looking for cost-effective products. During the last one year, we have downsized our enterprise products’ capabilities and packaged them to be available to channels and markets below enterprises, namely upper mid-market and mid–market.

Most customers buy an affordable storage solution to address their current data management requirements, which may or may not be feasible in the long run. Our partners have the choice to offer our storage infrastructure solutions, management software, and consulting services to enterprises for all their needs.

VENUGOPAL:The lessons learnt during the downturn will be relevant in the upturn as well. Most prudent enterprises have realized the wastage of storage resources, cost of storage administration, manpower and other related costs. The ‘small form factor’ servers at datacenters are performing various functions. This results in an increase in power and cooling costs. RoA is equally important as the RoI for a storage product solution. HDS software tools, like Quick Estimator, help partners demonstrate actual money savings to customers. We are educating partners to convey the storage economics aspect to financial departments of enterprises.

VENUGOPAL: Today, most enterprise customers are managing unstructured data and typically, datacenters use only 20 to 25 percent of their total storage assets. For channel partners, helping an enterprise utilize unused storage resources, will translate into a big business opportunity. Channel partners need to change gears to a business model that bundles hardware, software, and services rather than being mere IT hardware vendors. We plan to initiate many programs that will help partners make this transition smoothly. Innovative software and storage virtualization are just a few of the many technologies from our stable that can help optimize enterprise storage architecture.