HDS touts solutions centres, growth

Hitachi Data Systems is to a launch two new solutions centres in Melbourne and Sydney aimed at providing services for end-users and channel partners.

The centres – representing an investment of US one million dollars and currently kitted with HDS-only gear – will offer a “mini proof of concept” model for resellers and a test environment for end-users, HDS marketing manager Tim Smith said.

Having the distance between the two centres would also help reseller partners test networking latency issues and model rolling disaster recovery scenarios, he said.

“In the US, Fortune 50 companies are required to have data centres in different states due to compliance regulation so by having our solution centres in separate states we are also pre-empting [that sort of regulation].”

Smith said the centres, along with a number of new channel support staff hires, would help the company continue its dramatic local growth.

As of the December 2005 quarter the vendor’s SME sales had grown 900 per cent and enterprise sales 400 per cent, over the past three years, he said. The contribution from channel partners like Alphawest and Volante had also increased, hitting a 147 percent year on year growth for the same period.

This had largely been due to a sizeable increase in the channel/direct sales mix Smith said. Partners sales had grow up from five percent three years ago to 45 percent currently. HDS intended to grow this further to about 70 percent in the near future, Smith said.

However, with only 25 percent of local SMEs having moving toward NAS, according to Smith, the majority of storage market growth was yet to come: the company is predicting 15-20 percent market growth through to 2010.

“There’s a perception that storage technology like NAS is still being priced for the enterprise market,” he said. “But NAS has dropped from about $100,000 to about $15,000 in the last three years.

With larger organisations increasingly looking at varied SLAs for their different business functions, SME-style modular storage would also spur growth, Smith said.

“In the example of a bank, ATMs, online banking and treasury systems remain mission critical, but for business critical applications like email, [organisations] are looking at high availability modular offerings.