D-Link Aims High On Storage Business and is aiming to be among the top five vendors over the next 18 months.
.
“Storage requires a solutions-selling mindset. We expect VADs to help partners build and design end-to-end solutions,” said Satheesan.
Said Sumith Satheesan, AVP, Security & Storage Business, D-Link 
India, “According to Gartner, India’s IT infrastructure spending will exceed $2 billion by 2015, of which storage will contribute $436 million. The storage opportunity from SMBs alone is worth $100 million. Even large enterprises are considering storage solutions from new players at competitive prices for their branch-level requirements.”
The company is scouting for a separate set of regional value-added distributors (VADs) and tier-2 partners for storage. In all, it plans to appoint 18 regional VADs and almost 500 tier-2 partners over the next 6-12 months. D-Link has already appointed six regional distributors including SM Networks, DM Systems, Texonic Instruments and Data Systems
D-Link plans to appoint one person at each of its 18 branches to drive marketing, training and pre-sales support for the storage business.
The company intends to target verticals such as government, education and IT-ITeS where it has a large existing customer base. It will also target competitors’ accounts by aligning with partners promoting competing products.
D-Link offers iSCSI SAN storage, scalable up to 80 bays and 320 TB, starting from Rs 3 lakh. Its unified storage, which scales up to 24 TB and offers features such as thin provisioning and virtualization, starts from Rs 60,000. D-Link’s NAS solutions offer pre-loaded HDD variants for easy deployment, a free back-up solution, and mydlink cloud functionality, and are priced in the range of Rs 8,000-Rs 40,000.
The company plans to expand its storage range by introducing SAN solutions offering up to 192 bays and unified solutions with up to 24 bays.
