NEWS

Smarter Planet demands Smarter Technologies

What are the key issues faced by Indian SMBs in terms of data storage?

The major "pain points" that any Indian businesses are experiencing, include Managing and maintaining strong growth coupled with managing costs and complexities. Proper capacity forecasting and storage reporting are other major challenges. Back-up of administration and its management is yet another concern for any organization in the present time.

Hence, businesses, governments, and individuals will transform systems, operations, enterprises and personal lives to take advantage of a smart planet. Not simply because they want to - because they must.

The business systems of the world - from banking to retail, from water to roadways, from supply chains to human resource systems are becoming, in a word, "smarter". Today, instrumented, interconnected, intelligent devices are being sold by billions:

• 2.5 billion RFID tags sold in 2009

• 4 billion camera phones sold through 2009

• 2 billion people will be on the Web by 2011

How is IBM trying to offer solutions to the Indian business to manage structured and unstructured data?

Over the last few years, IBM has invested billions in various storage-related technologies. The investments are fuelling IBM's storage momentum. IBM recently announced 11-per cent revenue growth in its storage business for 1Q 2010 - with share gains across its entire portfolio, building on IBM outperforming EMC in 4Q 2009 storage revenue growth, according to IDC.

There are five key solution areas that we talk to our clients about:

• Storage Efficiency: Maximize the utilization of storage.

• Storage Virtualization: Flexibility to consolidate and move data where it is needed. To get the most from server virtualization, businesses must virtualize storage, too.

• Service Management: Understand what you have on the floor: assets, utilization, and performance. Automate processes to maintain performance levels while information grows.

• Backup and Disaster Recovery: Deduplication can dramatically reduce the amount of data businesses need to store, reducing backup windows and speeding restore times.

• Archive, Retention, and Compliance: Protect data efficiently throughout its useful life.

How ready is your channel to cater to the needs of the market?

One thing that makes IBM unique is that we are able to offer a "Total" Solution, with the widest selection of storage products of any vendor. The biggest strength that IBM can offer to its channel partners is the length and breadth of the products which is unmatched by any of our competitors.

Given the company's strong results in the storage market, IBM enables partners to quickly build a profitable storage business by selling proven, affordable, solutions for customers ranging from small and mid-size to enterprise-level organizations. Our partners are having huge success in this space.

What is driving IBM's market leadership?

Data is flowing in from everywhere and straining systems in enterprises of all sizes. IDC says, the world's data already exceeds available storage space - and demand for storage capacity is growing nearly 60 per cent a year. Businesses are struggling with the volume and evolving nature of the data they are already collecting. They are under huge pressure to turn this data into insight, and they are wrestling with how they are going to store and secure it all. According to Forrester, spending for storage will have the fastest growth in 2010 in the hardware segment.

Companies and governments are making capital investments to address three main challenges: cutting storage costs and making more efficient and reliable use of data; increasing capacity to store data on a massive scale; and categorizing and prioritizing data to gain insight through analytics. This is why IBM has invested billions over the last few years in storage innovations such as super-efficient grid-based storage arrays such as XIV, data deduplication for the elimination of redundant data copies, scale-out storage to support unstructured file-based data growth, and the Easy Tiering of data to prioritize data for workloads like real-time analytics to gain new insights. These continued investments in innovation have helped drive our market leadership across the globe and in India. The gains are also rooted in IBM's ability to help clients manoeuvre through the life cycle of data management, focussed in three areas: efficiency, growth, and competitive advantage.

What has contributed to the success of IBM?

In simple words: Innovation. Helping clients address all sorts of data challenges, IBM's strategy is to provide clients with innovative products and tools they need for the intelligent management and placement of information without adding complexity. We are investing both through acquisitions and organic development to drive this innovation in key storage technologies across software and hardware. The key weapon for us has been our acquisition of XIV, a high-end, disk storage system with a virtualized grid architecture designed to eliminate the complexity of storage administration. A lot of our clients say XIV is the easiest storage system they have ever installed and managed. IBM added more than 400 new storage customers to our client list based on their choice of the XIV storage platform in 2009, and we are off to a great start in the first quarter of 2010 with additional 75 new IBM storage clients. We have also added deduplication capabilities to the IBM Storage solution set through our acquisition of Diligent Technologies two years ago. So, our acquisitions are performing very well as we have ramped their development and sales capacity to fuel growth.

Additionally, we are making multimillion-dollar development investments in high-end file storage, archiving solutions, disk virtualization and tape density to continue to drive IBM leadership. Our recent achievement of a world record in a real data density on linear magnetic tape - 25 billion bits on a single cartridge - is a great example of leveraging IBM research capabilities to break through barriers.