NetApp has revolutionised the storage industry with the scale-out architecture in India. It has been providing platforms and the technology needed to store all the surveillance data to some key states, says Vinay Kumar Director Commercial & Government Sales of the company, in an interview with Arpit Gupta of Elets News Network (ENN)
Director Commercial &
Government Sales
Netapp
What were your expectations from the Union Budget? Do you feel it is a pro-Industry budget?
The Government should move swiftly to make Digital India a reality coupled with the pace of infrastructure building as these initiatives help propel growth across various sectors. The Union Budget 2016-2017 was certainly a transformative one with
The Union Budget 2016-2017 was certainly a transformative one with key focus on farmers and rural India, and the middle class and the Government clearly understand the power of technology as reflected in the larger flagship initiatives like Digital India. The focus on infrastructure build with substantial allocation and continued focus on skilling and empowering through additional allocations was the right thing to do for making the country more productive. The digitisation of the government sector—like setting up of Digital Literacy Mission, which will cover six crore rural households in India—ensures transparency and the huge focus on promoting startups will only help create more jobs and propel the economy further. The Budget could have, however, spelt out more steps to accelerate Digital India programme.
How is NetApp participating in the digital initiatives of the Government of India? How do you view India as a market for NetApp?
The PM announced the ‘Digital India’ initiative in August 2014 that seeks to bridge the digital gap, empowering the citizens of this country. The nuances that need to be addressed are the implementation of technologies, such as cloud, high-speed Internet, analytics and mobility that are required to bring about digital transformation. The architecture that will have to be built for creating the necessary ICT infrastructure at the micro-level of a gram panchayat should be scalable and interoperable at the outset. We understand the need of the hour and are focused on providing technologies that enable seamless functioning of such huge data repositories.
The Smart Cities initiative has proved to be a great opportunity for major technology players to come together and put a plan for the development and maintenance of the cities. The technology vendors are not chosen as independent players, but together as a large consortium of vendors contributing simultaneously; for example, Company A looks after software and networking, Company B looks after storage and onsite installation etc. We at NetApp are working with a large set of specialist System Integrators (SI) and consultants. Digital Video Surveillance is a key part of Smart Cities to provide surveillance and thereby citizen security. The platforms and technology needed to store all the surveillance data is what we have been providing to some key states in the recent past.
How has NetApp changed the portfolio of technologies it offers to the customers in order to adapt to the IT landscape that is shifting dramatically?
One of the things we are looking for is what platforms customers must consolidate on to, going forward. This is a big question right now. We have SAN and NAS. They were separate things in the past. Flash brings those two markets together in a way that it gives them managing capabilities of NAS systems with the performance needed for traditional block-based applications. Our customers in India are extremely excited about taking management and performance and bringing those two together in a way that wasn’t possible earlier. The ability to eliminate the time spent in managing performance is a huge new opportunity for IT in India to reclaim resources and apply them to other more valuable tasks.
NetApp has revolutionised the storage industry with the scale-out architecture. In today’s world, digital data is core to an organisation’s ability to capture new revenue opportunities with speed and at scale, while balancing cost and risk. Businesses can respond and innovate faster when data is free to flow where it is needed most. That’s the promise of Data Fabric, NetApp’s vision for the future of data management.
We believe the opportunities and risks associated with cloud adoption explains how a data fabric can help take full advantage of a hybrid cloud without radically changing management processes or retraining IT staff.
The Government has launched a drive to facilitate ‘Ease of Doing Business’ in India. How far have you benefited or expect to benefit from the campaign?
The new GST Bill inclusive of ‘Ease of Doing Business’ will ease out the transportation tolls and corruption exercised so far in the country. With the check post becoming non-relevant, it will knock out corruption at a fundamental level. The inefficiency in transport will be removed and streamlining a lot of costs will enable government to focus more on changing the infrastructure for better. The ‘Ease of Doing Business’ will be a huge disruption for many SMEs and SMBs. The Government’s drive on ease of doing business is to bring Industries to consumers through governance. Setting up a business is The new GST Bill inclusive of ‘Ease of Doing Business’ will ease out the transportation tolls and corruption exercised so far in the country. With the check post becoming non-relevant, it will knock out corruption at a fundamental level. The inefficiency in transport will be removed and streamlining a lot of costs will enable government to focus more on changing the infrastructure for better. The ‘Ease of Doing Business’ will be a huge disruption for many SMEs and SMBs.
The Government’s drive on ease of doing business is to bring Industries to consumers through governance. Setting up a business is easier with simplification of processes being undertaken, which means that more businesses will start and help grow the market.
We at NetApp tell startups to plan for growth, and therefore organise their IT infrastructure into easily expandable additive blocks that can scale up or down easily. The value of using a set of smaller parts for best performance and efficiency is not new. Advance planning is critical to their survival as unlike larger organizations, they cannot afford to make errors and see themselves going into a dark abyss. Trust forms a valuable component to their success which comes with the assurance of providing quality products and services to customers.