HP To Meet Media, Entertainment Storage Demand

With the media and entertainment industry growing at an alarming rate in India, technology vendors are eyeing this segment to expand their market capitalisation. Media and entertainment companies, on the other hand, are resorting to technological innovations to digitise and streamline their content in order to cater to today’s demanding audiences. These companies are looking for custom built solutions to satisfy their technology needs for storage, back up and data security. With an unprecedented growth in the amount of data generated, these companies are also looking for alternative content delivery models. IT solutions providers, thus, have tremendous opportunity to cater to this vertical by bundling their current solutions and also coming up with new offerings.

Donovon J Nickel, VP, Network Attached Storage Division, HP, says, “Explosion of content and the rise in Web 2.0 initiatives is driving the huge demand for flexible storage solutions across industry verticals. Media and entertainment companies are also looking at online applications for archiving, digitising and content aggregation.” Some media and entertainment players have taken a pioneer role in deploying technologies like high performance computing, storage and backup solutions and content management solutions.

To target this emerging segment, HP India has devised a special strategy. It is offering various solutions, which range from entry level SAN to high end, monolithic SAN. These include: Modular Storage Array (MSA), mid range class of Enterprise Virtual Arrays (EVA), high end XP class systems, and the newly-launched HP Extreme DS9100 (Extreme Data Storage). In addition to this, the company is also offering Virtual Tape Library (VTL) along with Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) coupled with StorNext and EFS Cluster Gateway solutions based on PolyServ. HP India has recently achieved the mark of selling 1000 EVAs in the Indian market.

HP India is also eyeing the high-end SMB segment to push these products as it thinks the price points are typically suitable for them. Manoj Suvarna, country head, Storage Works Division, HP India, said, “A number of SMBs are entering the communications and media vertical and to cater to their technology needs is a great challenge. In the present day, consolidation is the biggest challenge. We have created an ecosystem of partners and built an expansive solutions portfolio to approach these SMBs. The overall storage market in India is set to cross the $350 million mark this year and we are expecting to capture a good percentage of this market.”

At this stage, the company is positive about India as the market here is going to be ready to embrace new solutions with emerging business models and good infrastructure. The penetration of broadband and other technologies and their increased usage by media organisations is definitely going to drive significant IT investments by this vertical in India.