Being the Leader

Face to Face with Sandeep K Dutta,
VP-Storage, Systems and Technology Group, IBM India and South Asia

How do you rate your Q3 performance?

We have fantastic performance in all
growth markets especially in India. Our Storage and Technology
Group's (STG) revenue was up by 10 percent, whereas the total
revenue from systems storage increased by seven percent. However, it
needs to be noted that whenever storage grows exponentially, it
always has few drawbacks like manageability, cost, planning and other
related factors. From IBM perspective, when our customers ask for
storage efficiency, we tell them to understand their data which helps
in efficient data storage. The mid-range overall contributes 40
percent to external disk market and is growing at a CAGR of 18.9
percent. According to IDC, storage growth in India is about 14
percent CAGR.

How has the scenario in the storage
market changed recently?

Storage market has been growing at a
tremendous pace. Even in the international market, there are 2.5
billion RFIDs which got sold in 2009. It is estimated that 900
million GPS devices will get sold annually by 2013. Coming to the
hospitality sector, MRIs are being taken at a larger rate. Today
doctors can do 3D modeling and all this results in lot of data
creation. We have medical tourism coming into Indian market with lots
of possibilities along with other verticals like Government and Media.

According to you, what are the
primary challenges for vendors in the storage sector?

Most of our customers often haggle with
segregating data between important and not important. With businesses
growing day by day, managing IT costs and storage has been another
area of concern. Backup administration also poses to be a huge
problem. To counter this we analyze every problem area and come up
with solutions like data consolidation, data tracking and routing and
storage virutualization. We have been market leaders in storage in
2009 and had 24.10 percent marketshare in early 2010. However, our
biggest strength so far has been the ability to bring in new
technologies constantly right since
1956. We have successfully brought many 'firsts' to the industry
including virtualization, which everyone has been talking about.

Please highlight the recent launches
of IBM.

We have continuously striven to churn
the best products and solutions. Our fourth generation DS8000
enterprise disk platform has higher capacity. This can be trusted
with critical business applications and work load. Another new
addition in mid-range storage is Storwize V7000. This modular device
is designed to grow as per the need. Besides, advanced data
protection capabilities are already built in. It can expand upto nine
enclosures every 240 drives. We have added plenty of features like
auto discovery, easy navigation aids and realistic graphics. Storwize
V7000 is the first of its kind to appear in the market.

Please discuss about your channel
presence.

70 to 75 percent of our consolidated
business is through channels; hence they form a vital part. We
recently held a three-city launch of products. From a product view,
we are offering one of the best products in the market with plenty of
added features to give us the lead. Accessories are priced separately
so that partners can suggest suitable ones to their customers. We
have already enabled 150 of our channel partners and are running
programmes like 'Diwali Dhamaka', reward points and other
necessary channel schemes. There is also another scheme called IGF
which will run till April 2011. Partners can contact their respective
IBM representatives for more information.

What is your take on the future of
the Indian market this CY?

The Indian market is definitely
growing. During the first half of the year 2010, the market was
rather slow but second half onwards, it picked up dramatically
registering a double digit growth. I think that the Indian market has
confidence in IBM from both product and technology perspective. I
believe that our partners have huge faith in our products including
the recently launched Storwize V7000, DS8000 and Easy Tier. Every
second month we continue to offer something new to our partners and
customers from Power systems to System X to zEnterprise. Armed with
this, we aim to regain our leadership position this year.