Hitachi, Acer in marketing deal

Firms believe SMB segment will drive market in APAC region

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) and Taiwanese computer maker Acer on Thursday said they have agreed on a three year "joint marketing plan" for the Asia-Pacific market, including India.

Under the deal, Acer will market, sell and support the Hitachi Thunder 9500 V Series modular storage systems, senior executives from the firms told reporters here.

Acer will promote the Thunder family of storage systems with Altos servers, through its regional channel partners.

The deal will accelerate Acer's position in the entry to mid-level storage area network (SAN) market, the executives say. It will also give Hitachi Data a strong entry into the market that prefers storage-attached PC servers, they say.

The agreement covers India, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand.

Bruce Symes, vice president-Asia, Hitachi Data Systems said, "The HDS-Acer partnership gives the two companies significant competitive advantage. We see tremendous opportunity for growth in the small and medium enterprise market as more enterprise applications become available on the Windows operating system."

W S Mukund, managing director of Acer India, said, "By integrating Hitachi's industry-leading storage and storage area management, we are now able to deliver a truly complete and open SAN solution to SMEs." Acer will also become a "partner authorised service provider".

Its partners, which complete a training process, will be certified to provide installation and configuration of Hitachi Data Systems solutions, says Mukund.

In addition to Acer, Hitachi works with Sun Microsystems, Wipro, Apara and Ingram Micro in India. It has an original equipment maker tieup with printer and computer maker Hewlett Packard, says Symes.

Earlier this month, Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Japanese conglomerate Hitachi, announced its plans for the network attached storage (NAS) market. This included the introduction of new NAS products for both large enterprises and small and medium businesses.

Market researcher IDC forecasts the NAS market to grow at some 14.7 per cent, each year, to cross $3 billion in 2008. And Hitachi says, the SME segment will be a key driver of the growth.

So far, only large firms such as public telecom firms such as Bharti and BSNL, oil firm ONGC are among Hitachi Data's customers in India, a $150 million market, says Symes.