U.S. firms at storage networking meet in Bangalore

Friday, 17 January 2003, 20:30 IST
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NEW YORK: Some of the world's top storage networking experts are descending on Bangalore this month to acquaint Indian banks, corporates, system integrators and tech professionals with this fast-growing segment of IT. The four-day event, starting in India's IT capital from Monday, is the biggest yet in the sub-continent. It is attracting big firms that market these technologies like Cisco Systems, IBM, Network Appliance and Veritas. "Storage networking is an area of IT that is likely to grow at a frenetic pace over the next few years and all the big and small companies in the world are looking at network storage as a means to protect valuable data," said Kumar Malavalli, co-founder of Brocade Communications - a leader in fibre channel fabric solutions for storage networking - and main organiser of the conference. "We are excited about the Storage Networking Summit as we believe India offers a large market as well as some of the best minds in the field of development of new technologies in this sphere," said organiser Brenda Christensen. The first day of the event is devoted exclusively to tutorials, the second and third day for presentation of papers and the final day to channel development. "We have to create awareness within the U.S. that India can be used as an operation hub of the whole development process. In the U.S., we can just have sales and marketing team but you can get the operation units in India," emphasised Malavalli. Vivek Kulkarni, IT secretary of Karnataka, believes the summit is well timed because after 9/11 the importance of storage networking in the field of disaster recovery and business continuity has become even more marked. The speaker list reads like a veritable Who's Who in the global storage networking market. Apart from Malavalli, there's Dave Hitz, founder and executive vice-president of Network Appliance; W. Curtis Preston, president and COO of The Storage Group; Nora Denzel, senior VP at Hewlett-Packard; Soni Jiandani, VP, storage technology group at Cisco Systems, and Wayne Richard, VP, advanced storage technology at Seagate Technology. The sponsors are information technology department, the Karnataka government, Software Technology Parks of India, National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom), Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and major companies.
Source: IANS
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