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EMC strengthens its SMB offerings

 By K R Nambiar

EMC has announced aggressive pricing and fresh product alignment in a bid to increasingly penetrate the SMB market segment through its tier-2 partners. The storage major plans to increase its partner
network to around 200 by year-end.
“Since the middle of last year we have started thinking beyond the enterprise and have been plotting an SMB strategy. We are relying on the mid-market solutions provider to address this market segment,” said Viswanath Ramaswamy, the company’s Director for Partners and Alliances.
In February 2009 EMC had launched an entry-level Clarion AX4 box which provides 1.5 TB of storage at a retail price of Rs 2.6 lakh. “We got a tremendous response for this product which has been specially priced for the value-conscious Indian customer,” Ramaswamy noted. “SMB-focused SIs are also able to sell SAN
solutions to their customer base.”
EMC has also introduced a special edition of its enterprise-class backup and retrieval software called Networker Faststart. Said Ramaswamy: “We have introduced the product at a price of around Rs 3 lakh as compared to its earlier price of Rs 7 lakh.”
The company is using a dual-pronged strategy to make inroads into the NAS (network attached storage) market. Ramaswamy explained it. “We have integrated the Iomega NAS products and are offering our OS Lifeline with all Iomega storage products. We are also bundling Retrospect, our entry-level backup software, with select IX4 and IX2 NAS boxes from Iomega. We are positioning Iomega boxes against server NAS players such as IBM and HP. For the high-end NAS market we have now introduced Celerra NX4 at a price of around Rs 8.4 lakh.”
EMC India believes that the Iomega acquisition will play an important role because it enables the vendor to reach the smallest storage buyer.