'Our job is to create an awareness in the channel community about the relevance of a SAN solution'

A lot of hype had been created in the recent past around storage area
networking (SAN) solutions, but its true potential is yet to be realized by
enterprises. Deb Dutta resolves to bridge this gap. He projects Brocade in the
role of an evangelist who would educate and train partners as well as customers
on how SAN solutions can handle storage differently.

n How is Brocade’s business
placed as far as its presence in the APac market is concerned?

Currently, APac, which includes Japan as well, contributes nearly 20% to
Brocade’s worldwide revenue. Three years ago, its share was just about 6%. So
this shows the significance this market has. The growth in this region is
largely driven by emerging markets like India, China and Thailand, where the
entire paradigm is shifting from internal storage to network storage.

In more matured economies, the shift has been from internal storage to
direct-attached storage (DAS) and then to network storage. Also, what worked
well for us in the APac market is the early-mover advantage. So while we enjoy
nearly 70% marketshare globally, in places like China and India this is nearly
90%.

n What significant drivers motivate
customers to invest in SAN?

There are primarily five reasons why people buy SANs. One, it allows
companies to save money. Second, it eases their management tasks and enables
them to stretch their resources. Third, it allows them to mitigate their
business risks. Fourth, it offers high scalability and flexibility. And lastly,
it offers very high availability of data.

Also, the price-points of these solutions have come down significantly. A
couple of years ago, an entry-level SAN solution costed nearly Rs 10 lakh.
Today, it has come down to the Rs 4 lakh range. All these things put together
are getting customers more excited about adopting these solutions.

n In which major verticals do you
see the demand surging for the solution you offer?

Telcos are one of the most important verticals that use lots of data and hence
require cutting-edge solutions for data storage. The requirements in this space
is growing phenomenally.

These are followed by the banking and insurance sector. The landscape in this
vertical has undergone a sea change in last few years, including the way they
invest on IT.

Source: Brocade Communications

So if you look at our primary customers like HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and many
other nationalized banks, they are investing a good chunk of money on technology
infrastructure and undoubtedly a share of it comes for setting up storage
infrastructure.

Government, which is the largest technology buyer, is also waking up to the
efficiencies that a SAN solution can provide. In that direction, we have entered
into MoUs with three entities: National Informatics Center (NIC), Software
Technology Parks of India (STPI) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc).

n What important
steps have you taken to evangelize the benefits of a SAN solution?

Under the MoUs mentioned above, we have set up SAN labs, where even our
partners can work upon not just on Brocade equipment but in a heterogeneous
environment before they can actually deploy the solution. This helps customers,
partners as well as many from academic community to get a hands-on experience
about what SAN is all about and how it can bring about a change in the way
storage has been handled so far.

We have organized over 20 SAN.Ed workshops, where we trained
over 2,000 people in the country. We have also set up SAN Centers of Excellence
in alliance with STPI and NIC.

We also have a Brocade Connect portal having a membership of
over 600 people in the country. We have also built a strong channel
infrastructure and strengthening our relationships with partners like Satyam,
Tata Infotech, Apara, Wipro and so on.

n Does this mean
that you would be pushing your products through the traditional SI channel?

The way our business is positioned, we don’t sell a products per-se
through channel. Our solutions get integrated into products sold by OEMs like
HP, IBM and so on.

Our job is to purely create an awareness in the channel
community about the relevance of a SAN solution. So when we approach SI
partners, we are vendor-neutral. It’s not of importance to us as to who they
would be buying a SAN solution from.

Our concern is that they are well-educated and well-trained
on why they need to push SAN solutions and what’s the right pitch that they
should make to their customers. And after all, since we are commanding over 90%
share in this space, we are more or less sure that whichever OEM product
partners push, it would be largely a win for us.

So our engagement with the traditional SI channel is largely
at the level of evangelization, training, consultancy and further doing the same
at his customer’s end.

GOLDIE