This week HDS started a series of user conferences in the Asia Pacific region. The first event was in Jakarta and the second event was in Singapore. Attendance was up considerably, over last year’s events. Not only were there more customers, there were more resellers and ISV partners participating in these events which reflected our increasing market share in this region. The theme was “Economize Your Storage – Saving Strategies for a Sustainable Future”.
In Jakarta the streets were packed as always and security was tight around the Shangri La hotel where the event was held. Automobiles were stopped and inspected before they were allowed to enter the Hotel grounds. Everyone had to pass through metal detectors before they entered the hotel lobby. This created some delays for the hundreds of people who were attending our event. The importance of these precautions was under scored with the bombings of the Ritz Carlton and JW Marriot on Friday of this week. One of our meetings had just been held at the Ritz Carlton the Tuesday before.
The second event was held in Singapore where we have been growing our market share in double digits as the market responds to the benefits of virtualization and Dynamic Provisioning. While we were there, Singapore announced a surprising 2Q jump in GDP of 20.4%, followed the next day by China’s announcement of a 7.9% increase in GDP. These signs seem to indicate a sharp “V” shape recovery may be ahead for this region. Whether this happens or not, the companies who have adopted storage virtualization and Dynamic Provisioning are in the best position to not only survive the down turn but also respond quickly to opportunities during the upturn.
IDC presented their view of the Asia Pacific markets at these events. They showed that more mature markets like Korea and Australia have a higher percentage of SAN over DAS (Direct Attached Storage) than less mature markets like Vietnam. Adoption of new technologies is an indication of market maturity. IDC was strongly recommending adoption of new technologies like storage virtualization, thin provisioning, and de-duplication
One of the most successful and innovative companies in the world is StarHub, a communications and entertainment company that was founded in Singapore in 2000. We were fortunate to have Alex Siow, their Head of Information Technology and Program, as a speaker at our event. From their beginning in 2000, storage has grown from about 3 TB to over 500TB and is still being managed by two storage administrators. While they did not start with Hitachi storage, they converted over to the Lightning 9900 and saved over a million dollars with their first conversion. When the USP was announced they were one of the first to implement storage virtualization and tiered storage. This was followed by the purchase of the USP V and the implementation of Dynamic Provisioning. Last year they purchased the Hitachi Content Archive Platform to address the explosion of content data.
Alex noted that many CIOs are very conservative when it comes to storage. Their attitude on storage is, if it is working, don’t fix it. Alex believes that his job as a CIO is to leverage technology to lead innovation and increase the value of IT to the business. In business where the half life of a CIO is only two years, Alex has had a long career. As I noted in my previous blog post, progress does not depend on winning technology alone. It also requires people and process. People and process comes from leadership.
If you are in the Asia Pacific Region, look for our coming user events in Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Beijing, and ANZ. Go to this site to register.
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