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India is a booming market for storage solution providers, especially as storage needs are increasing exponentially in the market not just amongst large enterprises but also for the SMB segment. In such a scenario selling simple storage boxes will not do for the revenue growth in the long run. Realising this American Megatrends India (AMI), till now pushing mostly its whitebox storage solution, is gearing up to strengthen its brand recall amongst clients, new and old, this year.


To begin with the company is enhancing its customer and channel education programs and promotions. Says Sridharan Mani, CEO, AMI, Over all the Indian market for storage is seeing a boom. But the type of products being sold in the SME segment is not robust. Today most of them do not have strong hardware, software optimisation. In many cases especially for the SMB segment many storage solution providers are pushing storage products that have desktop or server quality hardware with few hard drives slotted in. This means the customers experience high level of system crash. That is where we come in. We need to educate the clients that they need to invest in storage solutions and not simply on boxes.


American Megatrends, the first company to build hardware RAID controller card called MegaRAID, which means it has a robust presence in embedded space. Today the company has applied for 50 plus patents. In fact our strong history in the storage makes us very strong in innovative, and cost effective storage solution development for the Indian market, adds Mr Mani. Today the brand has complete storage solutions for space-conscious environments, including custom-designed hardware, IP storage and network attached storage (NAS) software, custom designed backplanes with IPMI support and enclosure management controllers. Today AMI sells its products through two routes. It sells its StorTrends products through channel partners under AMI branding, and it also works with OEMs, and server integrators who put StorTrends products under their own branding. The increasing storage needs amongst enterprise and SMB, and also a need to cut down on operational costs, poses a great opportunity for our NAS and IP SAN products. In fact we have storage solutions where one appliance offer dual storage capability NAS and IP SAN. They are literally plug and play device that can be attached to existing Ethernet network, explains Mr Mani. In fact IP SAN and NAS are major focus for the company as SAN is growing at 26 percent annually, while NAS market is growing at around 32 percent annually.


Such products prove that AMIs strategy is based on product innovation, as the company projects itself more as a R&D based product innovation company, rather than simply a marketing company. That is why it works with its channel partners very closely in taking a solution based approach. It helps its partners understand the mission critical needs of clients. Currently we have three focussed channel partners the distributor who push our low end products to resellers; the value added resellers who sell more advanced solutions; and system integrators which include both solution providers, and whitebox integrators. We work with the system integrators closely to help them deploy the right storage solution which is not just a box but a combination of hardware and software, informs Mr Mani. He also stresses that it is beneficial for partners to work with AMI since the brand gives them a margin that ranges from 10 percent to 20 percent.


In fact he foresees that in the coming fiscal storage consolidation and virtualisation will be big. He also feels that NAS will have a bigger market as more and more SMBs understand the need to consolidate their storage infrastructure. This year AMI plans to put focus on segments like BFSI, healthcare, government, and automobile industry.