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Storage management has become critical for two reasons. First, there is an ever-increasing demand for storage due to the Internet, document management and data warehousing as well as increasing daily transaction volume in growing companies. Secondly, finding the time window in a 7x24 operation to copy huge databases for backup, archiving and disaster recovery has become more difficult. Still, the Giga Group projects the storage management software market to grow from $6 billion in 2000 to $18 billion to 20 billion by 2005. Rick Belluzzo, who quit a year ago as Microsoft’s COO to take over as chairman and CEO of the $871-million enterprise storage products vendor Quantum Corporation, sat down with Dataquest to elaborate on the new directions for the storage management industry in India and worldwide. Excerpts from the interview:

What are the themes you are bringing in on your visit?
Well, basically two points. Firstly, India is one of the very important investment markets that we have in our sights and there is immense potential here to grow business, grow market share and profits. In India, we have the best people in our departments to do that. The Indian market is growing for developers, we have seen a lot of IT infrastructure development, the workforce here has a huge technical focus and your IT services side is booming.

Secondly, it is also clear that we will over time, hopefully, (soon) have more development activities in India by working in strategic partnerships to help us accelerate development of our technologies and products, especially, software. We have a lot of work to do to build on what we started with our DX product line, SDLT (or SuperDLT, licensed to Quantum), DLTSage, and software which are among the main aspects of our products. We need help, and we need partnerships to further range up their capabilities. Over the next year, you will see us getting more active and significant in the market with one or more partnerships in product and technology development.

What’s your strategy here?
The product line that we have today is fairly vast: low-end tape drives and low-end to high-end tape libraries for the smaller user, and we also have the range of products required for the long haul for large, small and midsized companies. We could see a stronger market focus in the midsized segment in India. And, I do believe we will need a stronger enterprise focus in India, a stronger focus on managing client-vendor and client-partner relationships.

Are spending patterns in the storage market promising right now?
After the dotcom bubble burst, people started to absorb storage architectures to rationalize their infrastructure and buying products they didn’t really need. It was storage utilization gone out of control. That process is now mostly over.

I wouldn’t know if 2004 will prove to be the Big Year for a revival in overall techspend, but this year has seen a more or less stable pickup in spending on solutions. There is some level of growth in requisitioning of new IT infrastructure, but still not rapid enough, as some analyst reports would suggest.

Do you call that a rebound...
Not really. A saner market just gaining momentum would be more like it. People are still cautious, investments are still tight and companies are still concerned about spending money. At least with some of them, you do get the idea that these people want to grow, but you still feel that they are not spending enough on mission-critical data backup and recovery or new applications which you develop. That said, I would add that overall customer receptivity to new technology and products is definitely better than say, six months ago.

How are you managing customers’ demands? What are the key revenue drivers ahead for the data backup and recovery market?
Well, these problems are raised by unhappy customers with too many personnel to handle and balance it against urgent data recovery demands. I think the whole back-up and recovery segment is very labour-intensive and a lot of our users have found it very reliable. And, the demands to do more to protect more data are only going to grow. So will the focus on solutions from storage companies. The question of ensuring data reliability also explains our focus on finetuning applications at every layer and coming up with data management solutions to address every segment of the market.

Firstly, our strategy is to make tape better and faster, increase capacities and build new sets of features and functionalities—like DLTSage, or the software piloting our tape drives, or tape libraries which have huge archiving capabilities. There is the need to achieve higher levels of success and proactivity in the backup and archiving process.

Secondly, we have worked on making disk-based storage backup facilities more practical and easier to implement, more affordable to customers, besides cracking new ways to get disk-based backup to fit into the customer’s needs. Thirdly, all the software has to be made to work together and optimised at the customer’s end and this involves a lot of interaction and evaluation of customer assets. Our goal should be to eliminate the concept of data backup and archiving as we know it, but see it happen in a more seamless way through technology where data backup facilities can be seen as a symbol of operational strength. These are huge revenue drivers where we aspire for leadership position, and there is always huge scope for improvement here, besides making data management simpler and more effective.

How can storage implementations help effect a good tradeoff?
Well, you do have to make tradeoffs to manage costs and performance. The question is how to make that happen intelligently. We experience this conundrum whenever we bundle and sell disk-based products with a tape library. The question is to make people (clients) figure out, ‘I can take a library and put a disk at the front end, and optimise my solutions by letting data go to disk very fast, with prompt backups and eliminate the backup window and then keep it in there for 30 days, or whatever, and then put the data to tape and realise lower residency costs’. Now, this sort of a solution helps costs, optimise availability and retrieve the data from the right place—at least 80% of the time.

We have to find a way to effect the infrastructure/ security imperatives/ performance tradeoff more intelligently by getting more software-oriented. The storage industry is now delivering solutions to give customers more options to do just that.

How have you fared on the merger and acquisition front?
Well, we need to pick small and only then will we get big. Strategic acquisitions are critical to our cost structure and will drive scale and reflect further on our capabilities as a company. The tape drive industry needs to be consolidated, and we have made a lot of investments in M&As over the past few years which have helped us in a lot of ways—we have diversified into four different product lines in tape automation. Now we are further integrating our product line with acquisitions like Benchmark. We will be making more acquisitions, and right now, I believe we have a strong footprint to deliver on our software and overall product promises.

Ravi Menon in Bangalore

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