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As Hitachi Data Systems' Regional Director for South India,
Prashanth is not only looking to increasing the company's marketshare in the
region, but also plans to use the channels extensively to reach out to more
customers
What new responsibilities have you taken up in your current role?
As a Regional Director at HDS India, my primary responsibility is to drive
its business in South India. This includes focusing on expansion of the
company's revenue and increasing the marketshare. A key deliverable would be to
ensure that the HDS business strategies in the region are aligned with the
regional business dynamics. I will be leading the enterprise and channel sales
teams in order to manage the business in the region, as well as expand new
segments. I would be needed to provide regional sales direction and leadership,
and will closely work with Natarajan Viswanathan, MD-India, Hitachi Data Systems
and other business leaders in taking the company's leadership position in the
region to the next level.
What are your plans for expansion of the company's revenue and marketshare
in South India?
Market penetration will be a key focus area for us in the region. With data
storage needs growing at a very rapid pace, opportunities like compliance,
archiving, disk-based back-up and storage management are some of the solution
sets that we believe will be a driver for us in growing the revenue. Ofcourse,
due emphasis will be still be on managing our existing client base.
A very important initiative would be to strengthen further our channel
program in the region, because we believe the channel will be a key vehicle to
reach our stated objectives. With the growth in SMB and the mid-market segments,
coupled with the introduction of entry-level products like the SMS 100, channels
would be a key spoke in our delivery model to these segments.
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| Prashanth GJ Regional Director-South India, Hitachi Data
Systems India |
What new products and solutions is HDS planning over the next quarter?
In India, we are experiencing growth on two fronts-enterprise (Telco's, BFSI)
and SMB/mid-markets. A common underlying thread across all these segments is
unprecedented growth in data storage needs. Our application optimized storage
solutions enable users to match their application requirements to storage
attributes and provide application-centric management capabilities built on
advanced software, Hitachi storage systems, and a portfolio of services. This
approach also helps us meet one of the key demands of customers especially in
India, which is to make storage management simplified and keep the costs of
managing the infrastructure low over its entire life cycle.
We have announced the launch of Hitachi Data Migration Services, a
synergistic fusion of consultative services, advanced data movement software and
intelligent virtualization controllers, which enables the most efficient data
migration in the industry today with virtually no latency, no scalability
limitations, and no excuses.
Hitachi Data Migration Services enables enterprises to transparently migrate
data between heterogeneous storage systems while servers stay online
applications keep running, and user productivity levels remain completely
untouched-placing the needs of the business first.
We will be making many more such announcements in the coming months.
How would you equip partners, especially in South India, to bank on the
opportunity that India market offers them?
Building and leveraging the tier-2 channels is imperative for success in
this segment. Internally at HDS India, the focus on these channels is very high.
We understand the dynamics of the tier-2 channel space and have aligned our
channel program to it-emphasizing on ensuring channel profitability. We want our
channel partners to put up comprehensive business plans encompassing-the
numbers, target accounts, market segments, investment on skills and resources,
etc. This when closely monitored on an ongoing basis will ensure channel
success.
Continuous education, training programs-both on product/technology as well as
soft skills will be important. On boarding and enablement of any new partner
sign-ups becomes very critical for their success and we want to ensure that this
is a given.
We have also investing in lead generation programs to enable us to feed our
channels with qualified leads on a regular basis.
Talking of competition, what are the factors that differentiate HDS from
its competitions, and how do you position yourself amidst growing competition?
Hitachi is able to bring in and deploy its virtualization technology-even
if the customer does not currently use virtualization-to help deliver unmatched
application availability, extremely short downtime, no data loss and a
potentially shorter timeframe from planning to execution.
Today, there is a clear environmental impact of the growing data burden and
inefficient storage management and systems and eventually customers will need to
ensure their storage infrastructure is as efficient on operation costs as it is
on hardware costs. With rising energy costs, IT buyers are now starting to focus
on operational power consumption and are also becoming more environmentally
aware.
HDS is a partner of choice for implementing environmentally efficient IT
solutions and is fully committed to helping its customers: We intend to
implement more environmentally friendly data centers through technologies and
services, reduce their data center power, cooling, and facilities costs and
comply with environmental directives. HD's three-fold strategy for achieving
these goals is: designing, manufacturing, and supporting environmentally
friendly storage infrastructures throughout their entire life cycle-including
end-of-life disposal.
Subbalakshmi BM
subbalakshmibm@cybermedia.co.in Page(s) 1
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