 ""Media's Need For File System Archival Will Reach Zeta-Bytes"")
India is one of the emerging markets for backup, recovery and archival solutions in APAC. At least that’s what Quantum – a storage vendor specialising in data backup, recovery and archival solutions – believes. The company feels that the needs for data retention in India are as matured and evolving as the global market. Some of its potential markets in India for file system sharing and archival solutions are – media and entertainment, government, science and engineering and oil and gas. Lance Hukill, VP Worldwide Software Sales, Quantum, in a tête-à-tête with Biztech2.0 shares the opportunities that he sees in the Indian market.
Who are your potential target sectors in India and why?
While backup solutions are vertical independent, for file system and archival our main target audience are media and entertainment, government, science and engineering and oil and gas. Each of these segments is generating huge content/data and each has variable workflow with multiple access point of the same data.
Take for instance, the case of media and entertainment industry. While performing non-linear editing in digital format same data or content is accessed multiple times by different workflow aspects – sound, content, framing etc. This is made available through file system sharing and archival solutions.
In case of the government performing remote sensing and mapping activities, huge volume of data is collected through satellite imaging that needs to be analysed and processed for the end user. Or take for instance, the case of the oil and gas industry where data is collected in huge amount for highend clustering. What Quantum provides them is storage consolidation, highend data access to multiple users and data retention.
How have these industries evolved in terms of their storage needs?
Five years back, storage was new to the market; hence was expensive. Therefore oil and gas, or science and engineering players would build their own individual storage evolving into an individual island of infrastructure system that could solve petty problems. There was no infrastructure to support data intensive projects.
Today, while there’s a rise in the number of data intensive projects, the cost of storage is also coming down. As a result, data processing and managing multiple islands of data infrastructure for better performance is on the rise, thereby intensifying the usage of storage solutions.
What kind of challenges do you address for the oil and gas, science and engineering and government sectors?
These being traditional industries, one of their biggest challenges is getting solutions that can be integrated with their legacy systems or environment. Therefore, these sectors demand open standards-based solutions that can be integrated into any environment. Our file system sharing and archival solution being platform agnostic gives freedom of choice and ease of integration into any technology.
In the government sector, redundancies of information and data centre consolidation are two major challenges. Optimisation of storage through deduplication is the answer to this. But the major problem we face in penetrating the government sector is that they aren’t long-term thinkers in terms of storage investment.
Out of these sectors, where do you see the highest growth potential?
We believe media and entertainment industry’s need for file system sharing and archival will reach zeta-bytes. This is the most explosive market for us. Media is increasingly making use of big drivers and is moving from standard definition to high definition. There are huge challenges that media companies face in terms of transforming the old analogue format films into digital format, keeping content forever, and the ability to use stored content/data in different mediums.
What is your product roadmap and growth plans for the Indian market?
We will continue to focus on StoreNext adding new features based on the demand of our focus sectors. Further, with a dedicated sales team in place and a number of marketing initiatives like - industry and partner events - we hope to see good returns from India in the coming years.