India, 'one of our largest' product teams: NetApp's Julie Parrish

BANGALORE: Data storage vendor NetApp is focussed on selling not commoditised storage boxes, but sophisticated software-driven solutions that will help CIOs, technology heads of large corporations, migrate seamlessly to the cloud, a senior executive said.

The Sunnyvale, California-based $6.8 billion company views its Indian product development team as an integral part of this effort, Julie Parrish, senior vice president and chief marketing officer said in a recent interview. Of NetApp India’s 2,000 staff, some 1,200 could be involved in product development, Parrish said. The team was “one of our largest,” she said.

In addition to selling its products within the Indian market itself — NetApp has seven sales offices across India — the company’s engineering and development team will continue to see investments, Parrish said, without giving details. “We will continue to see investments in India, how much we grow is hard to say. Any geography can be a little bit tempered with the economic growth, so here we are in a period where growth will be catching up to the investment.”

NetApp also partners with India’s best known IT companies such as Wipro that play the role of system integrators, taking NetApp’s products to corporations in India. NetApp’s market share in India lagged its market share globally, Anil Valluri, president for India and SAARC, said.

Valluri, who has earlier worked for Sun Microsystems, said NetApp was targetting every segment of the Indian market, from the government, public sector enterprises, to tier-2 cities and commercial businesses. India is a very exciting place to be,” Valluri said, referring to the data explosion the country is seeing and the proliferation of “a billion phones.”

In absolute terms, however, the market was small enough to skew the market leadership rankings based on a single quarter’s “lumpy” order wins, he said. The Silicon Valley company is said to have lost out on a large contract from a major Indian telecom company, last year.

As technologies and business models evolved rapidly, taking advantage of cloud computing and software-as-aservice, “Discs and hardware have become commoditized, but software hasn't,” Parrish said. NetApp is focusing on or consolidating the data centre and implication of that on storage and is in talks with customers.