With the private cloud market growing faster in India, especially in the home, soho and SME space, tier-2 NAS solutions providers are finding their own due space. This is of course giving the market an opportunity to own the technologies, which otherwise would have been elusive for them.
Today, cloud computing market is booming in India giving the infrastructure providers the opportunity to position their solutions – for both private and private cloud. QNAP is basically a storage solution provider for the SMEs and the company boasts of having the best of the breed solutions addressing the requirement of the entire layer in the SME pyramid.
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“Many customers in the enterprise space prefer NetApp and EMC, which they deploy for storage purpose but they use our solutions for backup to create a balance of their budget.”
Alvin Wu
Sales Manager
Surveillance Business Division
QNAP
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Alvin Wu, Sales Manager, Surveillance Business Division, QNAP, said, “The benefit of QNAP over others is that our solutions can connect with IP cameras. We can connect more than 100 cameras at a time and more than 3000 camera models are compatible with solution. There are not many brands in the market, which can provide such rich features. We have more than 70 models. These models address the entire spectrum of market – starting from Home to SoHo, from SMEs and entry level enterprise.”
QNAP entry-level NAS starts with 1-Bay and it goes all the way to 24-Bay with each Bay offering 8 TB capacity. If this is not enough, you can expand it. One unit can be expanded to 8 units. He added, “You can have effectively 1.2 PB storage solution. I do not think many of our competitions do have this kind of solution. We also have dual controller and dual CPU models.”
He added, “We have customers in media, banks, enterprises, etc. Many customers in the enterprise space prefer NetApp and EMC, which they deploy for storage purpose but they use our solutions for backup to create a balance of their budget. Previously they used to buy two EMC boxes for both storage and backup but now customers wish to save money by combining QNAP solutions along with EMC machines.”
Todays, QNAP is proud to have some big names as its customers. But at the moment, the focus of the company is B2B market. Alvin added, “We have only 7 people in India. This limits our capability to cover the customers spread directly. May be in future times, when we will have more than 100 people, we will start focusing on the end-users directly but now, our focus lies in the partner business.”
“We have Iris Computers as our ND and there are regional distributors. For example, in north we have Squire Technology as our RD. Similarly, in south our RD is SMC Enterprises and in west we have Arihant Info Solutions as our RD. Apart from these organizations, we have some other organizations in these regions,” he added.
“In order to help these RDs and ND, we have local sales reps, who basically create sales leads for them. The role of these partners is to support us in logistic and managing partners. 80% of our business is managed by our team,” Alvin maintained.
As per Alvin, right now, QNAP’s business from India is US$1.5 million but is profitable. By 2016, the company has seen 30% growth, which is very good. Unlike other markets, India is pretty slow though, but Alvin of opinion that India can yield 30% YoY going forward.
In order to support solutions sold in the market, QNAP has two engineers – one in Bangalore and another in Mumbai. However, the company has started working with a third party for support. Alvin said, “Support used to be a challenge for us but now with third party coming in, we are very confident about our growth.”
Finally…
QNAP is also sensitive about the growing needs of the customers. Now, the company has Thunderbolt series and Dual Controller and Dual CPU NAS boxes. It means QNAP can easily address the large enterprises but what restrains them from doing that is their inadequate service engine to address entire spread of market. So, for time being, SME customers can enjoy enterprise-class solution from QNAP at a very competitive price point.
