Anybody visiting Beijing these days
would realize that major restructuring efforts are underway in PRC. Last week at SNW-China conference in the Kerry Centre of Beijing, I had the opportunity to witness and discuss the interest of Chinese IT professionals in Data Storage solutions.

With a fast growing economy in public and private sectors (e.g. Telecoms, Energy…) that benefits Chinese and foreign businesses, PRC is facing a rapid evolution of its IT infrastructure including data storage in order to scale, secure and protect all tools to access and manage business information. The 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing are also perceived locally as great business and technical motivations to demonstrate the ineluctable changes of IT infrastructures in China. InformationWeek has recently reported that IT spending in China will rise to US$142.3 billion this year, a 21 percent increase compared with last year and three and a half times greater than the rest of the world. As such China is expected to become the third largest IT and communications spender by 2009.

SNW-Beijing highlighted that in many ways the storage market trends in China echo what happened and is still happening in more mature storage market places such as US or Europe: tough TCO/ROI objectives, IT consolidation, Virtualization, Security are amongst top concerns of IT managers in PRC – no surprise here. The difference with other regions is that such IT infrastructure transformations have to happen in a much shorter timescale. Not only the very (very) centralized IT legacy systems have to grow and comply with new business expansion requirements (scalability, data protection plans…), but the IT Chinese market has to empower local SMB/SME to benefit from such IT changes, throughout the country. So strong product foundations to scale out and protect data as well as a reliable channels network will be key to succeed in PRC. 

I was also pleased to see the SNIA China continuing their efforts to educate Chinese IT professionals about the benefits of storage networks through a series of great tutorials and live demonstrations. Congratulations to my colleague Will Hsu in
Beijing for joining SNIA-China’s leadership team.

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