A: Where this industry was and where it is today, a lot of water has flown under the bridge. The development has never been chronicle. Traditionally, Indian IT has been a lot more focused on outsourcing. When we look at the domestic IT Industry, very little attention has been given to the decisive shifts that have occurred due to the deployment of technology which delivered value. India is one of the few markets where domestic IT players work more overseas and that’s why foreign IT vendors like us play a pivotal role in shaping the destiny of Indian industry. EMC was a very late entrant in the Indian market. In the last 10 years that EMC has been in India, it has helped the Indian enterprises tremendously in shaping their information infrastructure. In the year 2000, EMC entered in India with selected technologies and a few large customers.  It remained same for the next three years. In 2003 EMC announced US$ 100 million investment in India. The key goal was to grow the Network Attached Storage (NAS) market that didn’t even exist as a category. It wasn’t easy for us to speak in a language which Indian enterprises weren’t familiar with. NAS, at that time was just 35 percent of market. Direct Attached Storage (DAS) ruled it with 65 percent. Organisations, at that time, were more focused on technology than their information infrastructure. The slow growth of information was another factor which determined the usage of network attached storage.

There has been a dramatic change in the last five years. NAS today commands 85 percent of the external storage market and EMC is singularly responsible for this shift. It was an unprecedented event. According to you, EMC is to be given the credit of introducing network storage in India.

A: At that time, the industry focused on technology and not on information. IT companies were helping organisations computerise and thus offered a full suite of technologies, products and solutions. EMC is a specialist company. Our job was to educate the organisations about the importance of their information and deploy the right set of infrastructure to store, protect and access information. EMC has been at the forefront of information and thus we were able to convince that there needs to be an infrastructure approach to information rather than a tactical approach. The first sector that resonated well with our value proposition was telecom because of the enormous growth of customer data and thus the need for an information infrastructure. Network Storage, in its initial phase, was driven by the telecom sector. After deploying and stabilising on the Core Banking System (CBS) even the banks have taken the infrastructure approach to their information to manage and protect the latter.

Apart from educating the Indian enterprises on information infrastructure, EMC focused on forging strong partnerships. Seven years ago EMC had customers in just three cities. Today we have customers in 80 cities. Without the partners and their ability to scale, we would not have been successful. A few years ago we involved academia in this. Approximately 150 educational institutions in India today offer Information Management and Technology as part of their curriculum. EMC has helped in both designing curriculum and training the faculty.

Another thing why EMC was able to tap a lot of the Indian market was due to its ability to tap the talent. We reorganised our business almost every 18 months. At one point we had just two segments – enterprise and commercial. Then sensing demand, we changed our strategy and divided businesses according to geography.

A: EMC is a very acquisitive company. We have acquired many technology companies over the past few years. One thing that goes slightly unnoticed is our ability to utilise the available talent from those companies.

EMC may have started as an enterprise storage company but soon it expanded the market segments. From 2005-06 the company started addressing mid-market segment with products which had features of very high end systems.

With our acquisitions like Legato, Documentum and RSA, we have been able to deliver a significantly higher value to the customers, which also helped us in getting into the newer market segments.

There were a few areas left which EMC didn’t address – specifically in the consumer space. But with the acquisition of Iomega, we have started delivering the EMC value in that segment as well.

Of late there has been a lot of buzz around data backup, recovery and archival using the data deduplication technologies. EMC’s acquisition of Data Domain has filled in this gap very successfully.

In the last many years, EMC has moved away from a single technology – select customer syndrome to an end-to-end player cutting across consumers, midmarket and high end systems. Also, it has moved away from core storage technology to the larger information infrastructure domain including back-up, recovery, archival, deduplication etc.

A: From a go-to-market perspective, VMware is a partner of EMC. Our products, solutions and technologies weave very well in virtualised environment. Going forward as we help customers deploy private cloud, our ability to work with virtualisation technologies like VMware will play an important role in helping customers leveraging their infrastructure better.

A: In seven years, we have grown from merely three cities to 10 cities. Setting up a services footprint for these cities wasn’t easy. Today EMC has more than 15 spares and logistics centres across India. We have over 200 engineers providing implementation support and services to the customers. EMC has over 1500 customers in India today, which exclude the Iomega customers.

All in all it has been a momentous journey. In terms of investments, there have been four announcements so far. In 2003, when EMC for the first time invested US$ 100 million in the Indian market, there has been significant increment on that front. The 100 million became US$ 250 in the second round in 2005. In year 2006 it was US$ 500 million and last year EMC made its single biggest announcement taking the investment to US$ 2 billion.

A: One secret that can ascribe to this huge success is our ability to remain close to our customers. Everything that we did was directed by our customers. We listened and acted upon our customers’ advice. Initially our customers hesitated to buy EMC because of the prohibitive costs. A lot of them told us to be more affordable. Based on the feedback, in 2004 EMC launched 12 new affordable products. Majority of those products were focused on mid-market. Those arrays were fitted with advance features but within customer budget. It was a remarkable shift, which allowed us to go after a market which was otherwise out of our reach. Customers felt they were heard. That was also the first time that EMC introduced a range of products which were not just storage but also backup, recovery etc. – the whole range of information management. The journey continues even today.