IT needs a million storage professionals by 2012

Industry estimates put EMC as the leading External Storage Vendor in India, with 25 market share of the 284 million market, in the FY 2008. Overall external storage market as per Dataquest Top 20 estimates stood at 284 million in FY 2008

8220;EMC will extend its leadership in external storage to fast growing market segments such as Information Security, Content Management, Personal Storage and Cloud Computing over the next three years. We are confident that this new strategy will enable EMC to consolidate its leadership position in the enterprise segment and foray into the high growth consumer segment8221;, he added.

In its endeavour to customise solutions and services to different market segments, EMC realigned its business into enterprise and commercial division from it previous geographically aligned business, as a first pillar of the GTM strategy. EMC has also announced its plans to strengthen its information infrastructure offerings for the small office/home office SOHO segment in India and SAARC region.

As a second pillar of the strategy, EMC has strengthened its management team by new appointments on the posts of the vice president of Enterprise Business, India and SAARC region and the vice president, Commercial Business, India and SAARC region.

EMC on Wednesday also announced the expansion of its geographical presence in India by opening its offices in Ahmedabad and Pune. With the opening of these two offices EMC now boasts of its direct presence through nine offices in India and SAARC. The company also announced the opening of the 9th logistics and support centre in Pune.

Outlining as its third and fourth pillars of the strategy for growth, EMC announced nine new information infrastructure products for the India and SAARC market. The new products announced by EMC on the occasion include, EMC CLARiiON CX4 Series of midrange storage systems and EMC Celera NX4 entry level unified storage platform.

Both the new products have been designed to incorporate the latest technologies in drives, connectivity, processing power and security. All these features make it easier for customers to cost effectively consolidate and manage information using the least amount of power usage.

In its pursuit of tapping the huge commercial market segment in India, the company as a part of the fifth strategy has launched a 20-city partner recruitment road show to double its partner base from a current number of over 100 partners to more than 200 partners by 2009, wherein EMC has identified 20 clusters comprising of 40 cities to expand its presence through its partner network.

When asked about the educational initiatives of EMC, Mr Alok Ohrie told Expressindia that EMC has a full-fledged education strategy to address the emerging storage knowledge gap in the industry.

8220;We have an EMC Academic Alliance Programme EAA, which we rolled out in India, in 2006. We realised that by the year 2012, the industry would be looking for a million storage professionals. As a leader in the industry, we are going to build around that capability. We have tied up with more than a hundred academic institutes, such as NIT Warangal, NIT Surathkal to name a few to put our plan on the track,8221; Ohrie elaborated.