NetApp India has shared growth strategies for enhancing its presence in the telecom market.
It currently works with a number of telecom service providers in India to transform them to increase their B2B offerings from the traditional B2C oriented telecoms.
NetApp India works in two areas — infrastructure solutions in terms of data centres where they are running their billing systems, or operating systems ( OSS-BSS ).
How TRAI guidelines push storage demands
TRAI’s regulation to telecom service providers to keep data for at least 7 years not only includes bill information but also information shared via SMSs or any other form of data.
To keep such huge amounts of data for a long period of time, it is required for service providers to reduce their consumption within the data centre.
“We are working with some of the telecom operators to help them in reducing their data centre footprint, to enable them to keep such data for a longer period of time,” said Rajesh Awasthi, director Telecom & Cloud Service Provider, NetApp India.
VAS focus
Within VAS area, these can be B2C solutions; where NetApp works with some of the VAS service providers — On Mobile, Mahindra Comviva, etc — to make their infrastructure requirements by catering to the demand of all streaming functionalities in terms of movies and video clips watched by a number of people while reducing the data footprint.
Helping telecoms in B2B transformation
Telecom operators’ main focus was on mobility — B2C and VAS applications which were content driven.
Telecoms want to go to large enterprise customers, to whom they have been giving the network in terms of IPLCs or network lease lines. They wanted to move up the value chain because bandwidth has become a commodity.
At present, large telecom operators like Tata Communications, Tata Teleservices and Bharti Airtel are getting into the data centre business.
These telecom operators are looking at data center services space, meeting requirements in co-location space, but again that is also becoming a commodity.
Telecom operators are hiring across functioning professionals coming from the IT sector, but then again these are practice guys, who were limited to 2-3 in each region. “Here, we will complement them, till the time they become self-reliant,” Awasthi says.
NetApp is considering the telecom operators not only as its customers but also as partners.
NetApp is trying to marry VAR community with the service providers. For customers, it still remains the single entity.
Indian enterprise customers will decide whether they would buy a Capex solution which comes directly from NetApp or whether it will come through an operator. “This is something we are working on and these models will evolve over a period of time,” Awasthi added.
Data center
A number of hosting providers are coming up with large data centres – moving up the value chain on the enterprise infrastructure space where apart from co-location services, they are also offering to manage the equipment that is put in within the data centre which they call as the manage hosting services, which could be dedicated or shared services.
“With our experience with T-Systems (T Mobile), AT&T, Teramark, Telstra, Verizon, we work with the Indian operators to help them transition from a pure B2C operator to B2B operators,” Awasthi added.
While choosing data centres, companies look at the next 3 year business applicability and accordingly choose the adequate equipment. Through NetApp’s scale-out option, customers’ initial requirement can be met by a system which cost much less, helping businesses reduce their initial investment in data centres. Looking at their 3-year horizon, a company can start off with a very small system and as and when the business grows, companies can add more nodes to their cluster.
With data growth, enterprises are forced to buy more equipment, more power consumption, cooling equipment, rack-space requirement, everything goes up. Data growth has a rolling effect on all these aspects.
NetApp’s experience with working with data centre CIOs and data infrastructure managers helps the Indian telecom operators in their sales cycles.
NetApp India focus
In the last 12-13 years, NetApp has grown more or less in all verticals such as BSFI, manufacture, telecom, government organizations, IT services, healthcare, etc.
India is an important market for NetApp. Its global revenues for the first quarter of fiscal year 2014 were $1.516 billion, an increase of 5 percent. Revenue in Americas grew 7 percent, EMEA grew 2 percent and Asia-Pacific grew 3 percent on a year-over-year basis. NetApp does not share India-specific revenues.
Is NetApp a Cisco target?
Currently, IT industry analysts are speculating that NetApp would be taken over by Cisco later. NetApp, which had market value of about $12 billion, gives Cisco data-storage hardware and software to flesh out Cisco’s existing offerings in servers and networking gear.
Citrix, Florida-based company that gives Cisco virtualization software and other technologies for delivering cloud services over the Internet, also could be Cisco’s target list. Cisco announced $6.79 billion of takeovers in 2012, its busiest year since 2000, topping the $6.39 billion of takeovers revealed in 2005 and $6.22 billion in 2009, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Baburajan K
editor@telecomlead.com
