SMBs are a high growth opportunity for us

What has been EMCs SMB strategy for India ?

EMC has traditionally been a large enterprise vendor, but the company
decided to expand its base and over the last one year we have consciously tried
to expand our business in the small and medium business space with some of the
products like Clarion and Celera. These products were developed right from
scratch and are not stripped down version of our enterprise products. Thanks to
the acquisition that we made of Iomega, which is into lowend consumer segment.
This helped us leverage the brand awareness of this product line. We also have
online storage and backup offering called Mozy which is yet to be launched in
India. This is through our acquisition of Decho. At an appropriate time, we
would bring this offering to India.

What is going to be the impact of your global alliance with Dell?

This was an extension of the earlier relationship we had with Dell and given
the success we achieved, we decided to extend it and expand it to include
unified storage solutions.

How green are EMCs products and solutions?

At EMC, we have a very clear strategy with regard to the deployment of our
green solutions. Green IT and going green is not just about technology. It is a
philosophy in itself that transcends the infrastructure and smart purchases. It
needs to be approached with a vision that only comes with self awareness. As
outlined in the Best Practices query, a company must understand its own
functioning and this can be best done with an unbiased audit conducted by
experienced professionals. We have technologies and services that will provide
our customers the best fit solution they require. With regard to green IT, we
take a holistic approach advising our customers and partners to view the
business as a whole and implement policy-driven initiatives to achieve energy
efficiency. This is aimed at reducing power consumption while achieving the
required storage and business performance.

EMC had recently announced our strategy in this regard when we announced at
our recent Innovation Day event about the future availability of software
upgrades that will allow disks to power down while spinning when they are not
needed. In terms of flash drives, SSDs weigh less and consume less energy than
hard disk drives that use rotating media. When compared to a 73GB HDD, SSD uses
30-40% less energy. Currently SSDs are very expensive as compared to the HDDs.
As the cost of the SSDs reduces over a period of time, the energy savings will
become increasingly significant.

Sudesh Prasad

sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in