The $14-billion information infrastructure technology provider EMC grew 78% in India last fiscal, according to estimates by Dataquest. Manoj Chugh, president, EMC India & SAARC, restructured the firm?s business in the country and brought in new people. He also focused on ignored verticals and new technologies to counter the change in customer buying behaviour during the period. He speaks to FE?s Goutam Das on the prospects for this fiscal, the growing demand for storage in government, virtualisation and cloud technologies.
How has this fiscal shaped up for EMC?
I am focused on executing. I see growth from the pervasive drive in India towards virtualisation. As customers look at managing costs, virtualisation is going to play a central role. Data de-dupulication will be a key driver.
Most organisations have issues around backup. I will not be surprised if many organisations in 2011 give up tape and use data de-duplication technologies to archive information. The government and BFSI sectors can drive growth. BFSI companies are re-architecting their IT strategy.
How is the deal pipeline from the government for storage players?
The pipeline is building. Some of the projects should happen this year. I am far more confident of government spending now than three-four years ago. Three years ago, the contribution of the storage industry in technology spending from the government was less than 10%. It is in double digits today.
Look at all the big projects, the government is taking about. All of these need new IT infrastructure ? UID, the mission-mode projects, the state data centres, new applications within the states.
Lots of projects are getting deployed. Any application that is citizen-centric is bound to generate significant opportunities for people who have anything to do with data ? this includes us. There will be demand for data storage, back up, data de-duplication, business continuity and disaster recovery. We will be in play for all major government projects.
Are enterprises actually deploying cloud computing?
It is early days, but the journey has begun. Many big organisations have started moving to the private Cloud. I see more organisations accelerating the pace of the journey and this also includes mid-sized businesses. We are seeing significant amount of interest where organisations want to start deploying cloud technologies in order to reduce cost and leverage IT assets better.
Till 2009, EMC targeted only the high-end enterprises and the mid-market. How is the firm?s new consumer business coming up?
We leveraged the 2008 Iomega acquisition to bring data storage and protection solutions for consumers in a far more wholesome fashion than what we had done in the past. Early results have been encouraging, just in terms of numbers.