IBM

The last few years have witnessed stellar growth of IBM India not only in terms of manpower but also in revenue. India is the key market for IBM. The booming technology and the telecom sector have put the country on the path of a fast-growing economy. As a result, India has emerged as a business destination for technology companies. IBM seized the initiative and is a company on the move in India.

International Business Machines (IBM) of Armonk, New York, rolled out the IBM 5150, which is universally recognized as the ancestor of the modern PC. Today, PC has become part and parcel of every family. There are many people who spend their time more with the PC than their family members. However, gone are the days when IBM was seen mainly handling hardware business.

In recent years, the company has established itself as a services firm. And, last but not the least, it is one of the largest software suppliers in the world.

The company’s software business is worth US$20 billion, and 40 per cent of its profits come from this.

In 2009 alone, IBM bought five companies: Lombardi, a privately-held provider of business process management (BPM) software, data discovery software firm Exeros, database security firm Guardium, security provider Ounce Labs, and analytics provider SPSS.

The Big Blue also unveiled a number of cloud-oriented products and services in the previous year, including a new lab in Hong Kong, a Cloud Academy program designed to help educators and students pursue cloud-computing initiatives and better take advantage of collaboration technology in their studies, and a number of additions to the LotusLive hosted collaboration service.

Though it was a modest entity in the beginning of the new millennium, IBM India has been scaling new heights for the last few years. The real push came after 2003 when the company began making India an important base to support services for customers around the globe. In fact, India has become the epicentre for some of IBM’s most important projects.

Though IBM has avoided updating its India headcount, according to Wikipedia its workforce now totals 73,000, which is a giant leap from about 4,900 in 2002 and the company’s largest outside the US. In India, IBM tops the chart of MNCs with the most number of Indian employees.

IBM makes no secret of its plans for India. In fact, the Big Blue identified this country as one of its most important targets, and it has backed that up with huge investments.

Check Point

In the global Information Technology industry, without security solutions, not only the storage but also the entire IT landscape is insecure. So, secure IT is a new term, which is quite abuzz in the industry. In this scenario, security vendors are hard pressed to bring innovative solutions. Among the security solution providers, Check Point is considered a powerful player.

The core strength of Check Point lies in delivering IT security solutions ever since its inception in 1993. Today, the Company develops, markets and supports a wide range of software and combined hardware and software products that cover all the aspects of IT security, including network security, endpoint security and security management.

Check Point has recently launched Check Point Abra in India. Abra is a new solution which turns any PC into a fully secure corporate desktop. Abra provides users access to company emails, files and applications anywhere through integrated virtual private network (VPN) connectivity. Abra loads itself automatically on any PC and contains local encrypted storage to protect any data stored on the device.

“Abra is a revolution in securing mobility. It is the convergence of three technologies in the most cost-effective manner,” said Bhaskar Bakthavatsalu, Regional Director – India & SAARC, Check Point Software Technologies. “Abra combines secure virtualization, secure connectivity and data security in one single ultra-portable device. It empowers mobile workers with greater network access, putting their office right in their pocket.”

The advantage of Check Point is that the company develops technology from grounds up, which gels with the storage and networking solutions easily. For this, the Company focusses heavily on R&D and support mechanism. Not only this, Check Point also invests in empowering channel partners and marketing activities.

Check Point provides a broad range of security products and services that are open and flexible to fit all types of customer environments, whether that is a small business or a large Fortune 100 company. Check Point’s products are proven to provide the strongest level of security, across multiple layers of an organization’s information network: Network security to protect the network infrastructure; data security for ensuring data privacy; superior security management for delivering unified policy management, monitoring and analysis. And all these products are backed with world-class technical resources, research and response to help its customers to stay ahead of threats.

Dell

Dell has its most comprehensive presence outside the United States in India, with 21,500 employees who serve on teams in domestic sales, research & development, manufacturing, customer support, services and analytics.

Globally, Dell divided its business segments into five categories after acquiring Perot. These comprise large enterprises, small and medium enterprises, public sector (government, healthcare and education), gadgets (includes smartphones) and services. In India, the Company has adopted three focus areas.

“We want to use India as a critical hub for people across the world. In terms of our presence here, we have three areas. One is growing our India presence in terms of the hardware business. Two, entering into education and healthcare segment and then producing customized products and services. And, finally, managing and servicing offerings that we sell here,” said Anurag Jain, Vice-President of Dell Services Delivery.

In order to sustain accelerating growth in India, Dell Inc, the world’s second-largest maker of personal computers after HP, entered the retail arena. Dell opened its presence in the retail presence in India in April 2008 with its tie-up with Croma.  “At Dell, we constantly listen to customer feedback and found that, to effectively reach out to a wider customer audience, the retail channel was an important avenue to ensure physical presence, penetration and visibility of the brand and the product. The idea is to offer convenience and the touch-and-feel experience to Indian customers who are looking at buying Dell machines,” says Mahesh Bhalla, Executive Director and General Manager, Consumer, Dell India. “There are about 35 Dell exclusive stores in India and Dell also has a presence in large format stores including Croma and Staples, besides its presence in many resellers across tier 1/ 2 and 3 towns and cities. 

Dell’s channel programme is focussed on ensuring that the consumers get access to the products while making sure that the company’s channel partners and resellers remain profitable. “There are some nuances within the channel programme, wherein certain formats allow the customers to take advantage of Dell’s direct model. However, these are all various channels to ensure that the customers have the choice of where and how they want to buy the Dell products,” says Mahesh. 

Iomega Corporation

Iomega Corporation is an EMC company and provides storage and network security solutions for small businesses, home offices, consumers and others. EMC India has recently announced the appointment of Praveen Sahai as Director of Sales for Iomega in India and SAARC.

In this role, Praveen is responsible for Iomega’s end-to-end operations in India and the SAARC region, including pre-sales, sales, marketing and partner support functions.

Prior to his current posting, Praveen headed EMC's marketing and corporate affairs department, where he was responsible for spearheading strategic planning initiatives, including marketing strategy, and corporate brand building, as well as developing relationships with internal and external stakeholders in the region.

Commenting on the appointment, Manoj Chugh, President of EMC in India and SAARC, said, “We have seen strong traction from the SOHO and consumer markets for the Iomega range of storage products. The market for Iomega is growing exponentially in sync with information growth in the consumer and SMB space. We are confident that Praveen’s leadership and Iomega’s range of exciting products will help us increase our market share in these segments.”

Praveen Sahai said, “I am excited to take the new role at Iomega at a time when the brand is seeing resurgent growth. With the advantage of having the technology and marketing strength of EMC behind it, we aim to grow the market multi-fold over the coming years through driving awareness campaigns, education and partnership programmes that create the need and desire for customers to use personal and networked storage technologies that benefit them in their daily lives.”

Praveen joined EMC after holding senior positions in various multinationals and Indian corporations, including Sun Microsystems and PowerTel Boca, which was later acquired by Citrix.

Microsoft

Microsoft has influenced the life of each and every computer literate. The number could easily touch billions worldwide. Microsoft, with its Windows Operating System, changed the way computing was seen and used by the people. It helped to give the computer a new name that is personal computer or PC. PC has reached from enterprises to consumers. The effort for bringing PCs closer to consumers has helped in bringing out the unlimited potential among the consumers. This PC has sailed from countries to continents and today has helped the consumers and budding enterprises in the emerging countries like India to realize their true potential as well.
Having started its operations in 1990, Microsoft has since worked closely with the Indian Government, IT industry, academia and local developer community for ushering in some of the early successes in the realm of IT. In partnership with various stakeholders, it has undertaken – and continues to undertake – several initiatives aimed at enhancing competitiveness across industries, developing the local software ecosystem and creating affordable access to computing across India.

Microsoft India has 5,500-plus employees across its six business units, i.e., Microsoft Research India (MSR India), Microsoft India Development Centre (MSIDC), Microsoft Global Services India (MGSI), Microsoft IT-India Hyderabad, Sales and Marketing Services Group (SMSG), Microsoft Global Technical Support Centre (GTSC), Microsoft Entertainment and Devices Division (EDD) and MSN India.

The Company has been extending all its global programmes to India, including the Unlimited Potential, which aims at teaching teachers, students at the government school level.

Underlying the success of Microsoft India, there lies the concerted effort of its partners. The Company also reciprocates in the same way with the partners. Microsoft enables its partner ISVs to associate themselves with the early stages of product development so that ISVs are familiar with the latest technologies.

Microsoft’s long-term focus is on empowering over one billion Indian population, especially those who are currently on the wrong side of the digital divide to access technology and leverage it to realize their full potential. The launch of the Project Jyoti initiative in August 2004 represents a significant milestone in this journey wherein the Company is committed to taking the benefits of IT to the grassroots level and making a positive impact on the lives of women and underserved communities in rural India who face increasing marginalization in terms of basic access and skills training on the latest technologies and explore sustainable livelihood options.

Blue Coat

The expansion of business of the Indian enterprises has led to the emergence of latest trends in the areas of datacenter and application consolidation, mobile applications and remote access. This sort of emerging trends has led to the expansion of the market for secure content and application delivery in India. Blue Coat Systems, a Sunnyvale, California-based company with Virtual Netcomm Pvt. Ltd. and Westcon India as their value-added distributors in India, is making its best efforts to tap the Indian market in these spaces.

Blue Coat Systems is the technology leader in Application Delivery Networking.  Blue Coat offers an Application Delivery Network Infrastructure that provides the visibility, acceleration and security required to optimize and secure the flow of information to any user, on any network, anywhere.  This application intelligence enables enterprises to tightly align network investments with business requirements, speedy decision-making and secure business applications for long-term competitive advantage. 

Blue Coat has recently been named the leader in the worldwide market share for WAN Application Delivery for the first quarter of calendar year 2009. Blue Coat Systems is in the final stages of establishing S7 Software Solutions Pvt. Ltd. as its newest product development centre.  Blue Coat has dedicated the new centre in Bangalore, India. Having now obtained a controlling interest in the firm, Blue Coat has moved forward with its plans to turn the Bangalore entity into one of four major product development centres around the world.

Brian Ball, Senior Vice-President & General Manager, Blue Coat Systems, said, “Our new Bangalore Development Centre builds on the expertise and established momentum of S7 Software to immediately advance our development work.”

The new Bangalore centre will focus chiefly on management, reporting and client software products. Blue Coat plans to expand the centre by hiring additional top engineering talent over the next several months. Blue Coat intends to acquire the remaining shares of S7 Software upon the receipt of regulatory approval from the Indian Government.

"Blue Coat established itself as the market leader in the first quarter of 2009. This leadership results from a differentiated value proposition for the distributed enterprise," said Lucinda Borovick, Vice-President of datacenter networks, IDC.

NetApp

One of the overnight success stories, since its inception in 1992, NetApp has been steadily building on its networked-attached storage (NAS) filer base and is jockeying for the top position in the storage space.

NetApp offers a complete storage solution, with a touch of simplicity. “Simplifying Data Management” is a quick summary of NetApp. The storage solution of NetApp represents a good value for investment. The Return on Investment (RoI) is enormous. The Company is valued by the customers because of the ease and flexibility of its operations.

NetApp is making significant investments in people, infrastructure, training and education, and partner enablement, to take its business in India to the next level. NetApp has reached an important milestone of deploying more than 150,000 unified storage systems. The Company’s long-standing commitment and significant industry innovation are making unified storage a reality for customers.

Manish Goel, Executive Vice-President of Products, NetApp, said, “While many of our competitors resisted the technology evolution, NetApp was innovating. We believe that every storage solution provider will need to recognize and react to this significant industry trend and follow NetApp’s lead to remain relevant.” 

Customers worldwide are leveraging NetApp’s unified storage solutions to simplify operations, achieve business breakthroughs, increase productivity, and recognize significant cost savings.

NetApp provides storage virtualization technologies which can significantly reduce the storage required for production, backup, and DR with server virtualization.  NetApp ensures the savings found with server virtualization can be actualized and even enhanced with our storage virtualization technologies. NetApp’s unified storage provides the common shared infrastructure that supports all storage protocol needs.

NetApp provides virtualization capabilities at every level of the storage hierarchy and this capability is built into all NetApp storage platforms. NetApp's Data ONTAP software environment incorporates virtualization technology that simplifies enterprise data management while dramatically reducing TCO. Since Data ONTAP enables a logical presentation of data that is not constrained by physical storage infrastructure, attention can be focussed on critical business applications instead of hardware complexity.

“NetApp offers unique advantages for virtual environments, including close relationships with VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix to provide product integration and support for vSphere, Hyper-V, and XenServer, respectively,” says Rajesh Janey, President, NetApp India & SAAR.