We see a strong movement towards cloud in 2010

Give us an update of the companys storage business on

the global front.

On the global front, we have seen an uptake in end

customer demand which is encouraging, considering the IT restraints in 2009. We

have seen better demand in Q4. The US economy has been picking up, however there

is a slow growth in the European market. China has been strong even in the

downturn. India has also done well, even though the 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. Companies such as Amazon use our adapters and big server farms which

allow 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.

What are the benefits of cloud computing in the current

economic scenario?



The main benefit is pay-asyou-go factor. There is less capital

expenditure, especially for the SMBs. The large corporates have enough budgets

for IT spending and since we see India as a large market for SMBs, 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, there is tremendous scope for such

services, especially in emerging markets such as India.

What are the key trends in the storage business space?



One of key trends is server virtualization which is led by VMware. We also

see a strong movement towards cloud computing services in 2010. On the SMB

front, storage as a service would be well accepted since there are no capital

expenses or operating expenses. The large corporates would like it have 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 launched mid range products, and in Q1 we will be introducing more

entry level products, and towards the second half of the year we will be

introducing unified storage with the help of our acquisition of OnStore. We are

also working with companies such as Cisco and VMware for virtual machines.

PC Suraj



surajp@cybermedia.co.in