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Hitachi Data taps into India's booming storage market

Hitachi Data Systems, the US unit of Japan's Hitachi Ltd announced its entry into India's fast-growing data-storage market, which is already been keenly fought by global majors.

"Hitachi Data Systems has committed significant investments to its business and partners and expects to continue this investment policy in the Indian market," it said in a statement late on Wednesday.

The firm did not give any financial details.

Hitachi Data said it would aggressively hire staff to provide service and support to local customers and channel partners as part of its Indian plans.

"India has a tremendous potential to grow into a large player in the IT space and we would like to leverage this opportunity by having a presence in the Indian market," Greg Cornfield, Hitachi's executive vice-president, Asia Pacific, Latin America and Canada was quoted as saying.

Hitachi cited an International Data Corporation report which forecast the total market for storage worldwide to triple to 1.3 million terabytes by 2002 from this year.

Of this, India is expected to account for 3,527 TB of the storage market by 2002, up from 1,679 TB this year.

The global storage sector has seen voracious growth as data-storage systems make use networks to store e-mail, credit card data and Web traffic, instead of hard disk drives that store data on PCs.

High growth prospects have already lured EMC Corp, the No. 1 player in the data-storage business and other top firms like Compaq Computer Corp, IBM and Hewlett Packard Co to the Indian market.

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