By Ramdas S
IBM India has penned a channel strategy to push its enterprise storage solutions, announcing a number of initiatives including a few stock-and-sell products, financing for partners and customers, and channel enablement programs across all major cities.
The company, which recently launched its mid-range modular storage offering called Storewize V7000 and its enterprise-class SAN product line DS8000, has intensified its focus on increasing the availability of storage products among channels. “We realize that many mid-market customers don’t prefer the lead-time of back-to-back delivery, and hence we have worked with select partners to ensure that the stock of some of our fast-moving SAN solutions such as the DS 3000 series and our NAS products in the N Series is available off-the-shelf,” said Sandeep Dutta, VP, Storage, STG, IBM India and South Asia.
Dutta wants channel partners to be aware that IBM is the storage market leader for the past one-and-half year in the country.
“We closed H1 FY2010-11 with a 24 percent market share in the enterprise external storage and backup market, and have been the leader for the past 18 months according to research agency IDC.”
One of the key goals of the IBM storage team is to increase its mind share among IBM STG partners who buy IBM servers. “While in a year around 800-900 resellers buy IBM servers, our focused business partners for servers are around 100,” Dutta explained. “Today we engage with all the focused IBM server partners and also a few other systems integrators who are focused on storage. However, we engage with only around 50 partners among other 800-odd partners who sell at least one IBM server. Going ahead, the idea is to get more partners from that list to sell storage.”
While IBM does not offer any entry-level storage solutions for the SMB or SOHO market—unlike EMC—for enterprise NAS products, it has forged an OEM relationship with NetApp.
“For clients who would want to take advantage of our storage products but haven’t set aside the required IT budgets, or are keen on buying now and paying later, we have aggressive financing schemes in place from IBM Global Finance. These include buyback of used equipment, attractive lease terms, and no payments until 2011,” said Dutta.
He added that IBM will focus on increasing its presence in tier-2 and tier-3 cities through its geo-expansion strategy and STG plans to add more partners in key upcountry markets.
IBM had engaged in partner enablement programs in Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi as part of the launch of Storewize 7000. “Later this month we have enablement sessions across Goa, Indore, Nagpur, Hubli, Kochi and Hyderabad,” Datta informed. “In the next few months we will have channel enablement sessions for other markets." |