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The LearningCurve

EMC Corp is a rela-tive newcomer toIndia. It has realisedvery quickly that thisis where the actionis and will be. ATeam India Nowreport.

Manoj Chugh is going back toschool. No, the high-profilepresident of EMC (India andthe SAARC region) is not

planning to attend an executive develop-ment programme at one of India's burgeon-ing management schools. He doesn't havethe time for that. What he is doing insteadis pioneering an information storage educa-tion programme in India.

In April 2006, an agreement was signedwith the Delhi College of Engineering(DCE), under which DCE will start offeringthese courses from July 2006. Delhi ChiefMinister Sheila Dikshit flagged off the col-laboration.

“This agreement with EMC will enableDCE students to learn about informationstorage and management, the fastestgrowing segment of the IT industry,” saysDCE Principal P.B. Sharma. Echoes Chugh:“EMC plans to sign up 50 institutions inthis programme by the end of 2006, sothat our students are ready to contribute to

MANOJ CHUGH: Demand for skilled information storage professionals is growing

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one of the fastest growing segments in theIT industry. Increasingly, Indian organisa-tions want to build an intelligent informa-tion infrastructure. They need access to alarge pool of skilled information manage-ment and storage professionals. The esti-mated global demand for skilled informa-tion storage and management profession-als is 7.5 million by 2007.”

EMC is best placed to catalyse the cre-ation of more storage management profes-sionals. The Hopkinton (Massachusetts)-based company is the world leader in thesector. According to a report by marketanalyst IDC, EMC had a 20.7 per centshare in the $16 billion global external diskstorage systems market in 2005. It wasfollowed by HP, IBM and Dell. In storagesoftware, EMC topped with 29.7 per cent,with Symantec (20.3 per cent) and IBM(10.5 per cent) keeping it company at thetop.

In India too, EMC is the market leader.According to recent figures by market ana-lyst Gartner, EMC has a 21.4 per centshare of the Indian ECB (external controller-based) storage market. Next is Hewlett-

Packard (HP; 20.9 per cent), followed byIBM (18 per cent). The others in the frayinclude Network Appliance, SunMicrosystems, Dell and Hitachi.

It hasn't been a very easy journey tothe top and it will take some doing to staythere. Unlike, say, IBM which has been inthis country for several decades, EMC is anew kid on the block. In 2000, it had twoemployees. That number was up to 1,000at the end of 2005 (see table).

Chugh took charge at EMC in 2003 (hewas earlier president of Cisco Systems inIndia). He inherited a 2.9 per cent marketshare (2002 figures). HP ruled the roost

with a 43.1 per cent share. If EMC were togo places, it needed money. Chugh ropedin his colleagues in Asia, who could see theIndia market unfolding. Hopkinton, too,saw the light soon. Later in 2003, EMCannounced that it would pump in $100 mil-lion for its Indian operations over the nextfive years. “It was a victory for the Indiastory,” says Chugh. There was more tocome. In February 2005, EMC announcedthat it would be investing an additional$150 million.

The first tranche has gone largely for asoftware development and support centrein Bangalore. Inaugurating the centre lastyear, William J. Teuber Jr, executive vice-president and chief financial officer of EMCCorp, said: “With 60 per cent of IT spend-

TIE-UP: Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit with Prof. Sharma, Manoj Chugh, and Prakash Kumar, Secretary, IT and Training & Technical Education,Delhi Government, at the function where an agreement was signed between EMC and the Delhi College of Engineering

Employee strength at EMCIndiaYear

2000 3

2001 9

2002 21

2003 114

2004 632

2005 1000

2006* 1300

Figures at year end * Estimates Source: Dataquest, India Now estimates

EMC India’s RevenuesYear Revenue* Growth Rate(%)

2002-03 3.7

2003-04 25.3 571

2004-05 38.9 54

2005-06 54.4 40

* $ million Revenue in the earlier years is negligible Source: Dataquest, India Now estimates

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ing coming from outside the US and onlyaround 40 per cent of EMC's total rev-enues coming from the international mar-kets, we are focused on increasing ourinternational business to represent half ofour revenues over the next few years.”

“India is a strategic market for EMC andamong a handful of geographies that areright there at the top of the radar screen inEMC's corporate and Asia Pacific head-quarters,” says Steve Fitz, president ofEMC Asia Pacific & Japan, and senior vice-president of EMC Corporation. “Not only isIndia one of the fastest growing marketsfor information storage in the world, it hasalso grown into a cornerstone of our glob-al software development and support infra-structure. EMC continues to see India as aland of opportunity and we are committed

to investing here over the long term.” AddsSteve Coad, EMC General Manager SouthAsia: “India is absolutely critical to ourfuture plans.” It's the software develop-ment centre that gives weight to suchstatements. It is the largest such facilityoutside North America.

Chugh's strategy to grow the market inIndia has four key areas. “This consists ofinvesting in people, products, the partnernetwork in India, and support and develop-ment of EMC products,” says he.

Bangalore, along with other solutionscentres, is in the support and developmentrole. The partner locations are growing

apace; at the end of 2005, they stood at26. The number of products on offer hasbeen vastly increased. And the distributionchannels have been revamped. One key ini-tiative has been the Velocity Resellers pro-gramme, which is also making forays intonew markets.

Training is a big thing at EMC. That'snot only for its own staff. Partners andcustomers have to be educated too.

What makes EMC different from theother providers of storage is, says Chugh,the fact that “we are server agnostic.”IBM, HP and Sun sell servers too. So theirstorage comes packaged with that. EMCdoes not sell servers. So its wares can goalong with any other company's products.That's both an opportunity and a problem.Customers tend to treat storage as a partof the servers they buy. They don't shoparound for the best. “That's changing,however,” says Chugh. “Storage is beingincreasingly recognised as an area whereyou must take an independent buying deci-sion.”

What is storage all about and why is itimportant? It basically involves keep-

ing data safely (see box). There's the obvi-ous need to protect the knowledge base ofa company. Today, there are additionalimperatives. Disaster recovery and emailmanagement have moved up the list. “If anorganisation loses all its archived informa-tion, it becomes a headless chicken,” saysChugh. In India, demand for storage is alsolikely to be catalysed by new laws on dataprotection that are on the anvil, the require-ments and demands of the Right toInformation Act and the increasing need forgreater oversight in all aspects of corporatelife.

EMC hopes to ride all that to biggerthings. The company recorded a $54 mil-lion turnover in 2005-06 (these are indus-try and India Now estimates; the companydoes not release its figures). A quantumjump could come if it begins making itswares in this country.

But EMC has no plans today to set up amanufacturing base in India; all its needsare sourced from Ireland. But as the markethere explodes, you can't rule it out. It mayseem unlikely today, but the future couldwell see Chugh going back to Hopkinton,hat in hand. Don't be surprised if he comesback with several million dollars more - fora manufacturing plant.

Information storage is being increasinglyrecognised as a resource in its own right,and not merely as a peripheral device. Inthe past, Direct Attached Storage (DAS)was physically connected to the specificserver that used it. DAS is the term usedto describe a storage device that isdirectly attached to a host system. Thesimplest example of DAS is the internalhard drive of a server computer.

Today, organisations want all theirservers to be able to share the same stor-age resources. This is done by creating asecond network that connects theservers to shared storage at the devicelevel. In other words, networked storage.Network storage is a generic term usedto describe network-based data storage.

But there are many tech-nologies within it.Network AttachedStorage, or NAS, is a datastorage mechanism thatuses special devices con-nected directly to the net-work media. Thesedevices are assigned an IPaddress and can then beaccessed by clients via aserver that acts as a gate-way to the data, or insome cases allows thedevice to be accessed

directly by the clients without an inter-mediary.Storage Area Network (SAN) is a net-work of storage devices that are con-nected to each other and to a server, ora cluster of servers, which act as anaccess point to the SAN. Content Addressed Storage (CAS) repre-sents more than 70 per cent of theworld's newly-created data -- and pre-dominantly stored in offline formatstoday.Organisations in India have tended toinvest in DAS leading to the creation ofstovepipe architecture over time.Catalysed by the growth of IT applica-tions today, we are seeing an increasedshift away from DAS to NetworkedStorage (SAN, NAS and CAS).

THE STORAGE LEXICON

On the WebEMC India: http://india.emc.com/

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