Interview - "Synergy and Convergence will go hand in hand in the networking and storage space"

Storage as a service would be well accepted since there is no capital expenses
or operating expenses says Vic Mahadevan, VP, Product Marketing and Management,
LSI Corporation

Give
us an update of the company's storage business at a global level and in
the India market.
We have laid out our plans for 2010, describing the market conditions.
On a global basis we have seen an uptake in end customer demand which
is encouraging considering the tight IT restraints in 2009. We have
seen better demand in the fourth quarter. The US economy has been
picking up however there is a slow growth in the European markets.
China has been strong even in the downturn. India has also done well,
even though GDP growth has been marginal. But with the amount of
industry consolidation happening, we see a large amount of data storage
being consumed both by the SMBs and large corporates which is
encouraging for us. Companies such as Amazon use our adapters and big
server farms which allows them to have cooling of storage. We also
acquired a company, OnStore, a NAS company which now allows us to
provide a unified storage system.

How
do you see cloud computing and its benefits in the current economic
scenario?
The main benefit is “pay as you go” factor. There
is less capital expenditure specially for the SMB. The large corporates
have enough budget for IT spending and since we see India as a large
market for SMB's, cloud computing through service providers would
provide them complete solutions. Even regional service providers have a
lot of opportunities in this space. Since cloud computing would be on a
rental model basis, there is tremendous scope for such services
specially in emerging markets such as India.

What
are the key trends in the storage business space?
One of key trend is the server virtualization which is led by VMWare.
We also see a strong movement to cloud computing services in 2010. On
the SMB side, storage as a service would be well accepted since there
is no capital expenses or operating expenses. The large corporates
would like it internally as it allows them to pool heterogeneous
storage and offer that as a service to in-house clients. We see strong
demands from OEM customers as well. The national UID project will also
consume a lot of storage. Social networking sites and audio files also
consume a lot of storage from a file-based perspective as well, and our
OnStore acquisition allows us to offer that capability.

What
are your specific plans for India market for 2010?
We have started launching mid range products and in the first quarter
we will be introducing more entry level products and towards the second
half of the year we will be introducing the concept of unified storage
with the help of our acquisition of OnStore. We are also working with
companies such as Cisco and VMWare for virtual machines. Synergy and
convergence will go hand in hand in the networking and storage space.

How
much has slowdown affected LSI's business?
We did face a slowdown in our business similar to what other
enterprises faced in the first half of 2009. However we are now seeing
an end user demand starting from the US, followed by Asia Pacific and
thirdly in European markets.