‘2012, the year of BYOD, big data, and cloud’
In March’ 11, Brocade announced an investment of $100 mn in APAC in IT to deploy Ethernet fabrics for data centers. How has this been implemented so far?
Currently, company’s earnings from the Ethernet services is at $670 mn which is close to 44% of our total revenue. So, the huge priority for us currently is to cover more and more regions under this project and APAC is crucial for our business.
The $100 mn investment in the APAC region will be utilized to drive 4 major programs: First is try Brocade—a cloud study tour where the user organizations can ‘test drive’ the Brocade Ethernet fabric switches with VDX/VCS technology and further buy it. Currently, 30% of this tour has the Indian customers and second set of the customers will go in January 2012, in which 6 out of 15 will be from India. Second is data center master plan—where Brocade jointly determines the target environment and needs, and develops optimized solutions to address the needs of our customers, including governments. Third is technology transfer—brocade ensures the availability of trained manpower. Last is the Silicon Valley cloud study tour which started from September 2011 onwards, where customers were invited from India and other countries also to discuss and share issues and suggest a framework for the journey to the cloud.
How do you see the current trend in the Indian industry vis-à-vis the global trends?
In the last 5 to 10 years, huge transformation has come in, one is because the technologies were changing, generally the enterprise techniques and technology, but that has put in a lot of choke into our existing networks. And so, there is really any vendor that is actually seeing this amount of change and sees where the network is evolving and the changes that are happening.
While data increases, digitality increases and when networking increases from a business stand point, the cost would multiply to double; these are the challenges that the companies would start facing. So, it’s all about resurrective use of distance from a business stand point. This all leads to what is called the network transformation.
What, according to you, will be the top 5 technology trends that will keep the data networking players on their toes in 2012?
The top 5 technology trends we should watch out for in 2012 is ‘BYOD’ (bring your own device), which will change IT procurement in India; campus LAN, which will get smart and more innovations will follow; and rise of cloud service revenue in 2012. IT commoditization will continue through 2012. Virtualization strategies will permeate through all companies and the CXOS will become more vocal in whether or not their organizations have plans in place. Data consumption will continue to sky-rocket next year. 2011 was the year in which ‘big data’ stole headlines, but this trend will continue unabated through 2012. Holistic data center fabrics from the storage environment through to the Ethernet network are going to be the big trend in 2012.
akankshas@cybermedia.co.in