“Our product development and innovation focus is to become a full-service, independent supplier of storage, data and storage management software”

Acquiring both lateral and fresh talents, grooming internal people and
increasing focus on new product innovation are critical for NetApp to strengthen
its position in India. This is what Vikram Shah believes and he is busy
articulating these words into actions

What are your plans for propelling NetApp's growth in India?

Globally we are always open for organic and inorganic expansion. However, it
all depends on the opportunities available in the market. Our customer base in
India is ramping up significantly, and spans all major industry verticals like
IT/ITeS, offshore development, telecom, manu­fac­turing, BFSI, energy, services,
media/entertainment and retail. We have more than 300 customers and with every
passing month we are adding new customers to our portfolio. Our systems are
deployed in all major enterprise environments like file services, ERP,
databases, e-mail, back-up/recovery, business continuity, e-mail archival,
compliance and security.

Vikram Shah President-India Operations, Network Appliance Systems (India)

Building a strong and sustainable position in fast growing markets like India
is a clear priority for NetApp. Given our product leadership, we believe that we
are well positioned to lead the Indian market, going forward.

As per IDC estimates, going by revenue NetApp got 20 percent plus share of
the networked storage market for H1 FY 06. We have consistently maintained our
position among the top network storage vendors in India over the last few years
and would focus on enterprise datacenter space in 2007, with solutions for
primary storage, disk-to-disk back-up, business continuity, archival, compliance
and data security. To be able to address the target market, we are aggressively
developing our partners and investing in local infrastructure, systems and
people to scale up business.

What are the factors that differentiate NetApp from its competitions, and
makes it a leader in the storage space?

One of the things we are most proud of is that customers often tell us how easy
it is to work with NetApp equipments-easier to install, easier to provide a new
LUN, easier to increase or shrink volumes on the fly to reclaim unused storage
space and easier to replicate data. We are one of the largest vendors of
replication software that protects data by making remote site copies.

'Simplifying Data Manage­ment' is a quick summary of NetApp. This is the key
to our competitive advantage. We have good partnerships in place with major
application vendors like Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Symantec, Filenet, UGS,
Cadence, Rational besides infrastructure/OS vendors like Cisco, Brocade and Red
Hat.

What new responsibilities have you taken up in your current role?

I am driving technology innovation in key product/solution areas. This is an
operation where core technology innovation in multiple areas is being driven out
of India, rather than merely outsourcing to reduce costs. In my role I would
help leverage on the engineering talent that exists in India to

fuel product innovation that meets the needs of enterprise customers worldwide.

Given that Bangalore is an important support center out of the US for
NetApp, what plans do you have for the expansion of your operations here?

With a 200 percent growth this financial year, NetApp Bangalore is unarguably
experiencing the highest rate of growth among all NetApp centers worldwide. This
growth is across all projects and not just a one-time feature. It will continue
into the next year. In terms of manpower, we plan to acquire both lateral and
fresh talents. We have aggressive campus plans this year, whereby we drive
awareness activities in campuses on the explosive growth that data management
industry is experiencing.

Along with acquiring external talent, we will continue to groom talent
internally through structured development programs, in-house technical talks and
forums by NetApp experts, and regular visits by NetApp data management gurus.

Technically, NetApp Bangalore will continue to make significant contribution
to product roadmaps and patents. We are also looking at improving the degree of
ownership of products/releases here. However, in terms of geography, we don't
plan to expand beyond Bangalore as of now.

What kinds of products are expected out of the NetApp stable in the near
future?

We will continue offering solutions around primary storage, which includes
networked storage in the form of storage area networks (SANs) and network
attached storage (NAS).

We have evolved into unified storage architecture, providing file and block
level services, like CIFS, NFS, Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity,
write-once-read-many capability, robust replication facilities by midrange
standards, and thin provisioning and will add more innovations in these areas.

The Bangalore center will help us build more breakthrough products like
NetApp NearStore Virtual Tape Library (VTL).

We have an integration team in place for steering products such as SnapDrive
for UNIX and SnapManager for SQL Server to address the storage needs of these
applications. The challenge is to come up with a product that understands the
components of the applications and provides application-specific storage
management features. We are working towards providing integration features with
storage capabilities for host servers and major datacenter applications such as
Microsoft Exchange.

What trends do you expect to emerge in the storage space globally and in
India in future?

The move towards lower-cost disk technologies like SATA, as well as the move
towards larger disk drives, should continue. This creates a need for
technologies to better protect the data on the drive and utilize all of the
capacity that is available.

NetApp's core technologies like RAID-DP, which enable better resilience and
Flexible Volumes (FlexVol), which improve utilization are seeing rapid adoption
in the marketplace. These lower-cost, large drives are making disk-based systems
cost lesser than tape-based systems. Now that the cost is realistic, the rapid
recovery time that disks enable as compared to the existing, slower tape-based
infrastructure is fueling the growth of disk-to-disk backup. So we expect to see
a large move from tape to disk in the enterprise. Using systems that can support
multiple storage protocols and multiple server platforms will continue

to become more important. Customers want to consolidate their storage, and
want the flexibility to do NAS and SAN, IP SAN and Fibre Channel SAN, Windows
and Unix, all on one platform. This greatly improves asset utilization and
enables higher levels of investment protection. If the system can support
workload prioritization its even better.

Subbalakshmi BM