'2005 should see more interest towards tape automation'

With its focus towards the small and medium sized businesses in India,
storage provider Quantum Corporation is looking forward to expanding its
geographical reach in the country in terms of adding new partners. Zia Askari of
CyberMedia News spoke with Singapore-based Quantum APAC MD Emil Kobylarz about
the company's way forward in India and the tape storage industry in general.

How do you see the SME opportunity for Quantum's India operations in the
tape automation segment?

We are now focusing at catering to the growing opportunity in the SMB
segment in the country. We would be selling our low-end products for this
segment. Tape automation is a natural way to mature for any enterprise. Our
products in the tape automation space are ideally poised to manage storage needs
of any enterprise.

Emil Kobylarz

Year 2005 should see greater interest by SMBs and corporates towards tape
automation. This is going to happen as customers realize the risk of using a
single tape drive, versus using an automated tape library. At the same time tape
autoloaders are becoming extremely affordable, so this segment is likely to take
off fast.

How can disk co-exist with tape? There are a lot of CIOs who say that
monitoring the health of tape drives is still an issue. How does Quantum's
products handle this issue?

A lot of customers are also evaluating the benefit of adding disk to their
tape backup strategy in order to reduce their backup and restore window. A
typical strategy over here would be to go for backing up to disk and archiving
to tape-this is an ideal scenario where disk and tape co-exist.

Yes, monitoring the health of tape is an issue, and realizing this, we have
DLT Sage, an additional software, which is given free with our products.
Basically it prompts a CIO about the health of a tape in advance. So if
something is about to go wrong, the software will be able to inform the
concerned person well in advance.

What kind of expansion are you looking at in India?

We are now moving our energies to make sure that our products reach small B
and C class cities in the country. We have already appointed two national
distributors-Ingram Micro and Redington-to provide us with the reach. We are
looking forward to having between 25 to 30 focused resellers in the Indian
sub-continent. This is just one part of the overall strategy. In order to make
sure that our customers get good response, we are working closely with vCustomer,
a call center in Pune. This initiative is aimed at servicing our end customers
in a better way. In addition, we are also going to expand our manpower in the
Indian region.

With the acquisition of Certance, how do you place yourself with other
biggies like HP or IBM?

Companies like HP have always been format agnostic when it comes to offering
products, while we, with the help of the Certance acquisition, are in a position
to provide our products to a broad spectrum of customers.