When I started NetApp in India in 2000, along with two colleagues, we were a $600 million company. Today we are a $2.8 billion company (fiscal year 2007) worldwide, and have consistently been featuring among the top three networked storage vendors in India for the past four years. I would classify the story of our business growth in India into three stages - Startup, Productivity and Enterprise.

In the startup phase, it was all about making breakthroughs and being relevant to the market's needs. In a product category like enterprise data storage, which is critical to a customer's IT infrastructure and where there are established players, one has to build credibility among customers. I am happy to say that the initial customers we gained during that phase continue to be - even today - happy customers and strong advocates, even after their infrastructure has undergone multiple technology refresh cycles. We have grown with these customers.

Because of the explosive growth in electronic data and the associated storage and data management challenges, pure play storage vendors soon transitioned from being niche players to broad based IT Infrastructure players. This is what I would call the productivity phase. It was the time to take our rightful position in the marketplace and we executed flawlessly on this, leading to our emergence as the third most sought after networked storage vendor in India. Our customer base now includes the 'who's who of the Indian industry', across all the verticals.

What has changed from the initial startup days? The company has implemented strong business processes, such as customer support and professional services, to support our aggressive revenue growth and the increasingly sophisticated customer requirements. If you don't implement effective business processes, you will not make the cut and I can hardly over emphasise this.

During these growth years, what has not changed is our focus on innovation and culture. Innovation is all about being the first to identify underlying customer problems and then seizing the market opportunity by delivering solutions to address those problems. Along with this what is equally important is the culture of the organization because it is the culture that brings out the best in an organization's employees and motivates them to deliver.