Looking at the dynamics of IT industry and evolving new technologies, to become a leader in a market like India over a short period of ten years is certainly a difficult challenge. The major player in storage market, has literally done the same to achieve a leadership in Indian market today. From just a pure storage player, EMC today is all geared up to provide information infrastructure to cloud service providers. Though it entered India in 2000 eyeing a big slice of the enterprise storage segment, its performance in initial years was below expectation and was an unranked player in the market.

“I joined EMC in 2003, and my goal was to move the company to a leadership position in the storage industry in India. At that time EMC was an unranked player in the market and most of the customers dealt with our competitors,” said Manoj Chugh, EMC India president and managing director. “So the immediate task was how to drive EMC’s business to customers so the industry views us as a leader. Though we were leaders worldwide, it was not so in India,” Chugh added. During the same year, EMC announced its first major investment of US$ 100 million for India. It was Chugh’s strong vision and commitment towards his goal that turned the table for EMC’s business in India. It took us about 18 months to reach the leadership position in the enterprise network storage market. And one of the reasons for our growth at that point of time was the telecommunication industry.

There was a significant growth of subscribers at that time and the service providers needed our technology, both on the BSS and OSS front, to support the growth of subscribers and their services. After capturing the enterprise market successfully, EMC further explored the mid-market by bringing in a range of products during 2005-06. It adopted the go-to-market strategy which moved from enterprise to mid-market segment by restructuring and diversifying the business and offerings around geographies. EMC’s growth is propelled by strong financial support in form of large funds coming in at regular intervals. EMC’s investment in India has went up from US$ 100 million in 2003 to US$ 500 million in 2006 and further it rose to US$ 1.5 billion in 2009. And already the company is committed to take up the total investment to US$ 2 billion by 2014. It has completed 10 years in India and it’s no longer just a storage company.

So far our journey in India has been very carefully moving from being just pure storage to information Infrastructure Company. This has happened significantly due to some 40 acquisitions in the last five years, which has brought in some interesting technologies. I think the cloud computing wave will be bigger than any other wave seen before in India and I see tremendous opportunities for private cloud here. Our goal is to provide infrastructure on top of which customers can build cloud and offer services. So we want to provide cloud infrastructure specifically on the information infrastructure.

According to an industry survey the network storage was worth Rs 17,000 crore for the financial year 2009-10 and EMC dominated with 25.9 % market share in India. For the third quarter, EMC Corporation posted consolidated revenue of US$ 4.21 billion, an 20 % rise compared to the year-ago quarter and the revenues outside the US operations touched US$ 1.9 billion which included 23 % share from Asia Pacific and Japan region.