NetApp India Plans To Ramp Up Operations In Tier-3, Tier-4 Cities
NetApp India is planning to ramp up its operations in tier-3 and tier-4 cities and expand its footprint into smaller cities that are currently untapped, said Anil Valluri, President, NetApp India & SAARC.
The data management company sees huge opportunity in small and medium businesses (SMBs) and public sector undertakings (PSUs) and is looking to foray into industries such as retail, manufacturing, and government including projects of national importance.
Globally, the company is in its 25th year of existence that has grown from a startup to a $5.5 billion company. Its India operations, started 15 years back, is today one of its most important centres globally. “In a very contrarian view, to me India is the most developed nation in terms of the number of mobile users and number of social media users,” Valluri said.
NetApp in India is building solutions to modernise the data centre in terms of software-defined technologies, cloud, flash, analytics, and data security. It is focusing on industry segments that are most amenable to data scale up – sectors like banking, telecom, government, manufacturing, and oil & gas. Due to the regulatory environment, healthcare still has a lot of potential and is currently untapped, said Valluri.
Valluri explains how NetApp has survived multiple downturns and emerged as a stronger company. “We have survived multiple market shifts. During the dot com bust, we came back very strong…during the slowdown of 2008, we reinvented ourselves by relooking at storage virtualisation…again during the slowdown 2010-13, we went through tough times but reinvented again by undergoing a two-year transformational journey,” he said.
NetApp has become the fastest company globally to cross a billion dollar in revenue in the flash storage space, Valluri says. Its all-flash array annualised net revenue run rate for Q4 stood at $1.70 billion, up almost 140 per cent year-on-year. It shipped more than an exabyte of flash in fiscal year 2017.
NetApp is also betting big on its Data Fabric architecture, a software-defined approach to data management that enables businesses to connect disparate data/storage resources and streamline data management between on-premises and cloud storage.
