Adaptec puts thrust on Indian distribution network

Adaptec is putting a major thrust on the growing Indian market. The company,
right now in India, has associations with OEMs, white box manufacturers and
channel partners. It also has an R&D center in Hyderabad, which is the only
R&D center out of its headquarter in Milpitas, California.

Adaptec is trying to increase the headcount multifold in India in the next
two to three years. "We want to put major thrust on our commitment of
growth and support to the channels in India. Our impetus would be on giving
technically sound solutions to our channel partners in India, as this market is
growing stupendously," said David Noah Nair, Country Manager (Indian Sub
Continent), Adaptec (India) Pvt Ltd. He is planning major promotional campaigns
for the various products it has in offering. The product spectrum constitutes of
storage network solutions, server storage solutions and desktop solutions.

The storage network solutions includes the IP storage connectivity, offload
and acceleration; fiber channel SAN extension solutions, etc. Also, the company
is in the process of developing a future storage networking technology that
would include Infiniband. The server storage solutions includes SCSI adapter
cards and controller chips for high-speed data access in workstations and
servers and RAID controllers for data redundancy and protection. Desktop
solutions include USB2.0, 1394 (FireWire), SCSI and RAID adapters and solutions
for Windows and Mac-based PCs.

Adaptec has devised a three pronged strategy to capture the growing Indian
market. First of all Nair wants to brush up the brand presence in India. He
said, "Brand equity is good, but visibility has been missing. Those who
know our company vouch for Adaptec's quality and technology, but those who don't
know will be our target here." Also to increase the brand visibility it
would be announcing one new distributor soon. Right now it has two distributors
in India--Neoteric and Cyberstar.

Secondly, it would like to create a strong channel network, which would
include major SIs, VARs and assemblers. The company would also concentrate on
the technical education of these partners. "I want to have a balance
between the push and the pull of our products in the market. Education is a good
tool to create push in the market and the new brand visibility should be able to
create pull in the market," Nair pointed out.

Finally, it would concentrate on education of the end-user and its channel
partners in the country. Adaptec offers a high-end training--Adaptec Certified
Systems Partner program, which it would like to introduce in India soon. Right
now it will only be channeling its efforts in bigger cities, thus according to
Nair, educating them will be the first move in increasing the brand visibility.

Talking about the future plans of Adaptec, Hung Kwang Tan, Technology
Consultant (Asia Pacific), Adaptec, said that Adaptec would expend its core
competence and would explore high-end storage solutions too. "We already
supply state-of-art solutions to big OEMs such as IBM and now we want to focus
on high-end storage solutions as they would be the future of storage. We are
planning to put impetus on the IP storage front."

Nair was resilient about Adaptec's presence here in India and plans to
fortify it further with a distributor which would share the same vision of
growth in India as his. It would be announcing the new distributor very shortly.

Asim Raina & Shweta Khanna