The Hindu Business Line : Brocade fine-tunes India plan — Low-cost SAN tools; skills transfer

INFRASTRUCTURE solutions provider for storage area networks (SANs), Brocade Communications Systems, has said that it is gearing up to cater to the growing storage market in the country through a combination of low-entry level SAN solutions and by making investments in education and technology skill transfer.

The company said it had strengthened its relationship with the Indian market with an organisational alignment that involves outsourcing software development to India apart from consolidating Brocade's OEM and the sales team into one.

Outlining the company's plan for India, Mr Greg Reyes, Chairman and CEO, Brocade Communications, said here on Friday, "For the world of storage, India is the next Mecca with a `hot' rating from IDC and a projected growth rate of 21 per cent year-on-year till 2007. That said, over 50 per cent of Indian enterprises still do not have SAN in their frame of reference. Brocade is keen on accelerating the transition to SAN and is investing in education and skill transfer, empowering its partners to provide service and support and R&D to meet and grow the demand for SAN solutions."

Sectors such as telecom, banking, and financial services and insurance (BFSI), manufacturing and ITeS are poised to be the biggest spenders on storage, according to Brocade. These verticals are high users of fibre channel SAN since they are data-intensive and there is a need for ways of storing, securing and retrieving. India is also poised to be the ideal location for corporates to set up disaster recovery sites, which will give further impetus to the storage networking market.

In addition to companies based in metros and manufacturing, there is a huge demand from B and C class cities and the SME segment. These factors have made India a high revenue opportunity for storage vendors. Brocade is focused on providing its customers with scalable, inter-operable and easy to manage solutions, a press statement said.

"With the launch of our products in May this year, there is a strong focus on the SMB segment ," said Mr Tom Buiocchi, Brocade Vice-President for Marketing. "We are also making large investments with our channel partners ," he added.