Acer revamps its server strategy in India

Ties up with Hitachi Data Systems

The $15 billion Acer Corporation has outlined plans to finetune its strategy for the enterprise server market in India.

The company will be shortly rolling out its partnership with Hitachi Data Systems to increase penetration and make storage area networking for the masses a reality.

Acer is also revamping its entire offering in the server space which should be hitting the market by August 2004. The IT products major, which so far has stayed out of outsourcing software development from India, is now looking at starting this in a small way.

Bert Noah, head of enterprise products line, Acer Inc, said, "The addressable server market on the Intel platform in India is 60,000 units. We currently have 13 per cent market share making us the third largest player after HP and IBM in this market. We are looking at a 35-40 per cent growth during the current year and the association with Hitachi Data Systems will be one of the components that will fuel our growth."

Detailing this alliance, Noah said that Acer alongwith Hitachi Data Systems will now be able to uniquely address the $10,000 and sub-$10,000 SAN addressable market on Intel platform base in the country through joint initiatives.

This partnership will propel themselves against a similar Dell-EMC strategy to jointly widen the server market across the globe.

Commenting on the storage market in India, Noah said that the addressable market for this is $127 million and Acer along with Hitachi is hoping to garner a 5-10 per cent market share in the first year of their association.

Terming the competition as pretty tough, he further said that Acer will not be buying market share by dropping prices.

"We are revamping our server offerings and expanding our vertical focus to include the BPO and government besides our current focus on banking, financial institutions and insurance."

Noah further added he has set the ball rolling for outsourcing software development from India and the process should be starting by third quarter of calendar 2004.