'We are looking at India for our go-to-market capability

How has been the transition of Quantum from hard disk to the storage
systems business?

We are redefining ourselves and refocusing on our company in keeping with
the new market forces, trends, and technologies. That process started several
years ago, when we divested our hard drive business. We began to focus more on
storage systems, which is a very big transition.Things really accelerated for us
when we merged with ADIC (Advanced Digital Information Corporation).

What is going to be the focus of the newly launched development center in
Hyderabad?

Our recent announcement of setting up a development center in Hyderabad is
part of our strategy to leverage the engineering and software potential
available in India. This is important both from the market and engineering
perspectives. We set up a center in Hyderabad because we found that there was an
ecosystem of storage companies.

We are not here for lowering our cost. We are growing our software business
everywhere, including the US, and we thought we could grow faster with investing
in India because of the availability of software talent.

Our goal is to have a team that not only does engineering and fixes bugs, but
owns a piece of our software platform so that they can have a mission. We expect
this to be a team with full responsibility for the entire product lifecycle. We
are starting with our DXi product line, which is the secondary storage disk
system that we introduced recently. We are looking at India for our go to the
market capability, by better servicing the customers through our Bangalore,
Hyderbad, and Pune centers.

What are some of the new areas of opportunity for Quantum?

Most enterprises are facing the problem of having multiple copies of the
same data in their environment for various reasonsrecovery, archiving, and
compliance. We looked at this market and found that enterprises have demands for
problems arising out of handling complexities of recovery and information
lifecycle management. We see this as a very rich area and very much aligned with
our positioning.

There is a rapid growth in new technologies around capacity optimized
storage, continuous data protection, and are in some ways shifting away from the
traditional batch back up to a more continuous and policy-driven model around
the whole infrastructure. The tape market has some growth, but the emerging
segments have more growth potential. We feel that we have built a strong
position as a specialist in the secondary storage market.

How is Quantum placed after the ADIC merger?

We are a $1 bn plus company now and we are servicing our customers in 180
countries. We merged with ADIC as we identified some important areas that were
critical to success. The first was to grow the market access and we have
increased our presence everywhere, including Asia Pacific. Quantum was stronger
in India and ADIC was stronger in China. We also improved our business model and
shifted our strategies that have allowed us to invest more.

The merger improved our financials because tape companies were under pressure
and the industry was consolidating, and so by coming together, we have been able
to rationalize the company, move investments, eliminate duplication, and greatly
improve our financial performance.

What would be Quantums strategies going forward?

Our strategy is three pronged. First, to grow on the segments of tape
segment, which is tape automation in the mid range; second, to build the disk
software business in the new and emerging markets where we see tremendous
growth; and third, to make our go to the market segments a critical area of
reaching customers and delivering solutions. We are trying to become more
end-customer focused.

Sudesh Prasad

sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in