"We see 'StaaS' to have huge traction in India"

Extensive experience in the IT/Telecom Software solution/services sales and service delivery with leading organizations, Rajesh Awasthi, Director-telco and cloud Business,NetApp India explained how the company has revamped its GTM strategies and how new areas like Storage as-a-service poses huge scope of growth for comapnies like NetApp. Excerpts:

"StaaS" or 'Storage -as-a-service' can be a huge araes of growth for both storage vendors and cloud service providers, said Rajesh Awasthi, Director- Telco and Cloud Business, NetApp India, Director, telco and Lcoud, Netapp India in an exclusive interaction with Dataquest.

Looking at current scenario; Rajesh explains that with the need of 'disaster recovery mechanism' and 'Data protection applications'; storage as a service has huge scope for growth globally aswell as for India.

"Disaster recovery-as-a-service(DR) and Data protection(DP) as-a-service is being focussed by us in big way. We have collaborated with Tata Communications to give storage with computing services since last year."

Amazon Web services also tied up Net App to provide the 'DR and DP as a service' in Asia Pacific.

Currently, In India Tata communications, BSNL along with Dimension Data and Sai Infosystems are providing this service, said Rajesh,Net App.

Focus 2013

Talking about key strategic plans for 2013, Rajesh expalined that they have redirected and enhanced certain focus areas for their company.

"We have reinforced our go-to-market strategy last year where we will be focussing on our enterprise customers largely from areas like BFSI, telecom, IT-ITES, Telecom, Manufacturing and Govt,"he expalined.

For Telecom specifically, NetApp is focussing on B2B space.

"Till now, we were foucing on VAS space where comviva, Onmobile and Spice mobile etc were using our solutions. But we are now shifting our focus to B2B space aswell. We are also very keen in trageting pure Data center palyers as well," insists Rajesh.

 

He also said that company is focusing on covering commercial market geographically as well expanding their footprint to small cities and other countries of SAARC region.

NetApp has been focusing on goverment initiated projects for past one year. To this, Rajesh expalined that Net App has been underatking certain key projects in this regard.

"We have been part of state data center project initiated by department of IT for indian states. Also we are actively part of Airpotrt automation pojects by governemnt of India for many cities," reveals Rajesh.

He also said that their company is looikng into high performance computing araes which is giving high traction for NetApp.

Cloud Strategy

With respect to the cloud strategy, Rajesh explained how their comapny has been innovator in storage and cloud domain and how their strategy for the same keep upgrading with current trends.

"We have been always given cloud as a service in partnerships with telecom service providers. Quite recently, we have started incorportaing channel partnerships along with telco partnerships by creating a model as such for this ecossytem.This business partnership has been key arae of our cloud strategy," said Rajesh Awasthi, Director- Telco and Cloud Business, NetApp India, Director- Telco and Cloud Business, NetApp India.