HITACHI DATA SYSTEMS TURNS ITS SPOTLIGHT ON ASEAN

       Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) plans focus more on the Asean region, because it has the highest growth markets in the Asia-Pacific.
       Kevin Eggleston, senior vice president and general manager for the Asia-Pacific, said Asean countries were important markets for HDS. By the end of the first quarter of this year, Asean was the No-1 growth market in the Asia-Pacific, surpassing India, which was the highest growth market last year.
       Focusing on Asean is part of the company's strategy of consentrating on high-growth markets, which still include India and China. As well, its three main business strategies are expanding to vertical markets, focusing on its flagship solutions - storage virtualisation, dynamic provisioning, and tier storage and archiving-and concentrating more on partnerships and channels.
       "Asean was our No-2 market last year, following India. But at the end of the first quarter - the end of our fiscal year - Asean was No 1. The Asean market has had amazing growth for us," Eggleston said.
       He said HDS's unique solutions - storage virtualisation, dynamic provisioning and tier storage and archiving-were widely accepted by many more enterprise customers because the company had been marketing them for five years, and this had helped the company achieve growth that contrasted markedly with the storage market, which had declined.
       "This year, we expect double-digit growth even though the market is expected to decline. We will grow while the market shrinks because of our right technology and solutions. Our customers see the huge benefits of our virtualisation technologies," he said.
       Eggleston said storage virtualisation was really hard to achieve because it was very complicated. To develop the best solutions for its customers, Hitachi Data Systems had about 2,000 staff with doctoral qualifications working on research and development in storage virtualisation technologies. The company spends about US$2 billion (Bt 68.12 billion) on research and development each year.
       HDS also plans in the coming year to focus on vertical markets that have high demands for data, including government, financial services, healthcare, media and security.
       Eggleston said high-growth markets across the Asia-Pacific included telecommunications and media (and social networking), financial services, the government sector and manufacturing. When combined, these represented 60-80 per cent of the storage market in the Asia-Pacific.
       "Telecommunications and media are the No-1 growth market, because many countries in the region have implemented 3G networks, and that means huge demands for data. Social networking is also a very high growth area for storage, but the market is not yet huge."
       He said cloud computing would be the next revolution for the storage industry, and HDS aimed to be the leading infrastructure enabler for cloud computing. Its 13,000 platforms support cloud computing while its nearest competitor has only 500 platforms.
       "In every quarter, we gain 100 new customers in the Asia-Pacific region. We are No 1 in enerprise storage globally, and we want to maintain our leading position in the market," Eggleston said.
       Meanwhile, the country manager of Hitachi Data Systems (Thailand), Taveesak Saengthong, said his company had achieved growth of between 8 and 10 per cent last year, while the storage market in Thailand had shrunk by 6 per cent. The top five markets in Thailand include banking and financial services, telecommunications, government, media and content and healthcare.