Backup and Recovery: Solutions is the Growth Engine





Backup and Recovery: Solutions is the Growth Engine Date: Monday , October 01, 2012 Surajit Sen is the Country Manager-Backup Recovery System (BRS) at EMC India and SAARC. EMC (NYSE: EMC) enables businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver information technology as a service. BRS focuses on protecting information and preserving all changes to that information for extended periods of time, eliminating slow data backup and recovery while improving reliability, and minimizing IT investments and reducing power costs while increasing end-user confidence. In a career spanning over 17 years, Sen has managed various leadership roles in Sales, Sales Management, Product Management, Channel Management and Field Marketing. Prior to EMC, he worked at NetApp, Wipro Infotech and HCL Infosystems. He holds an engineering degree from IIT Roorkee and an MBA from Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies. In conversation with Surajit Sen, he opens up on how the organizations are dealing with data deduplication. Emerging trends Our industry is plagued with the explosion of data. The sheer volumes of data being generated by various business automation platform and tools that organizations are adopting are tremendous. It is becoming big challenge for organizations to store, manage and protect the data that their organization is producing. The value and criticality of information being available to the right person at the right time is very vital for the success of any business. How to harness this data for better business intelligence, how to make better business return from the generated business data from various tools and systems that they have is another complexity that organizations are facing. Traditionally data and business availability used to fall back on certain processes backed up by technologies like tape. But over the last decade, tape as the technology has not changed but the density has increased making it quite unsuited for big businesses. To overcome this, the industry has started experimenting Disk based backup solutions. But what gave it a big momentum is ‘deduplication’, a technology that helps to deduplicate any redundant data in an organization. In big organizations the sheer volume of duplicate data is unbelievable. Deduplication as a technology strategically brings down the actual amount of data that one needs to protect, therefore making disk based backup a reality. As deduplication reduces the amount of data to be stored, the disk based backup infrastructure is becoming economically viable. Role of startups Growth in the industry is powered by many startups that bring in new ideas, concepts, and innovations. Unfortunately, their go-to-market strategy depends on how quickly they can move from a prototype to a product that depends on the information infrastructure. Very often these startup companies lack adequate funding to build sophisticated infrastructure to compete with the big guys, so they leverage services offered by the cloud service providers which can give them scale in a very short span of time and too quickly at the low entry level investment. Cloud plays right into the hands of what the startup community demands from IT infrastructure and these two are going to play on how the uptake of cloud services in India is going to happen. All leading cloud providers in India offer backup as a service and this is the biggest opportunity that I see growing here. Key Drivers of Growth We are at the cutting edge of the technology, and innovation is the biggest driver for our growth. The market is changing and customers have become more demanding asking for different solutions. Today innovation is driven by local needs. At EMC, we practice ‘Reverse Innovation’. We have a large engineering center based in Bangalore and have over 4000 employees in the facility. We encourage people there to interact with local customers, perceive and understand their requirement and how it is different from customers from other parts of the world. Then they come up with products that are designed for India specific customers. These innovations are taken across to headquarters and productize and sold to other parts of the world. Customers from small cities can also have access to our products and solutions which is a huge differentiator that we bring to the table. We have a go-to-market strategy where we collaborate with cloud service providers who offer services based on our technology. We are seeing some good traction in the market where customers have shown a lot of interest in buying BaaS with our partners having services build on our technology. Today some of our biggest consumers are those in banking and finance, telecom, government, and manufacturing sector. We also see emerging verticals like healthcare, and media and entertainment that are emerging to be substantial consumers of backup technology. India - A Growth Market? India is growing rapidly, but has some distance to go in terms of becoming a feasible market. However, the potential is huge as the market is growing faster than most of the market worldwide. The strategic growth depends on a number of factors of different parameters like micro economic conditions which plays a vital role. Our GDP growth rate has slowed down considerably but is quite ahead than other developing countries and this is going to play a big role. Today our market is thriving and offers huge opportunity for growth. When it comes to technology requirement and customer’s demand, India is no different. There could be specific tactical issues where some local innovation is required to offer the customers’ solutions. India is maturing, and is little less matured compared to developed countries in regulatory compliance norms which are becoming more matured and slowly been driven by the governing bodies like SEBI and RBI. But we may be few years behind the developed markets like U.S. and Europe. Once that starts maturing, it would again place a huge amount of demand on how customers backup and manage their data. Those in turn will again impetus industry at large. Changes Ahead I have been in the industry for a long time and have a fairly good understanding about the market, and how customers see and perceive different solutions. These two months have been unbelievable, as whoever I meet, be it customers or partners, own tremendous excitement around this area. Everybody perceives backup and recovery solutions to be their growth engine. Most of the customers have genuinely admitted to have a problem which their current infrastructure and technology they use. They are keen to engage in a conversation and dialogue with our team and explore how some of these path breaking innovative technologies which we have can solve their problems. Leadership – My Way Every leader has got a different style of leadership and I probably have my own style. I believe in empowering my team. If you are part of EMC organization, you certainly have the right skills and capabilities and therefore you should be trusted and empowered to make your own decisions. As a leader my primary responsibility is to ensure that I remove obstacles that my team member faces. Ours is an open door policy and anybody is more than welcome to step into at any point of time. We spend vital part of our life working in our respective organization. It is important that we learn from each other and grow professionally and personally. (As told to Anamika Sahu)