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Hitachi Sees UK Sunrise, Plans Mid-Range Products

Posted on: Friday, 3 August 2007, 06:23 CDT

Sun Microsystems doubled its business selling re-branded versions of Hitachi storage gear in the UK last year, according to Hitachi's storage subsidiary Hitachi Data Systems.

HDS UK managing director Steve Murphy said that one of the reasons for this is that Sun's UK storage organization has not suffered from the distraction of the merger with StorageTek, which has damaged Sun's storage business elsewhere.

Murphy also put the growth down to the staples of effective account management, sales planning, and education. "We've helped tie together the Sun-StorageTek-Hitachi environments," he said.

The doubling of UK revenue from Sun in Hitachi's fiscal year to March 2007 will continue this year, Murphy said. But while the majority of the growth to date has been from sales to larger customers, he hopes that the expansion this year will be driven by sales to mid-sized businesses of mid-range products such as Hitachi's AMS disk arrays.

That ties in with a decision by Hitachi UK to step up its focus on small and mid-sized customers, which will include the launch of a new product. Murphy would give no details of that device, but said that it had moved beyond an "embryonic" stage, and would take Hitachi into a "start-up area."

Hitachi's focus on the mid-market mirrors that of its high end rivals such as EMC, and is being driven by the fact that the mid-range happens to have been the fastest growing sector of the storage market for some while.

Reflecting the challenge for all storage vendors attempting to grow their business in the hugely competitive and entrenched high-end market, Murphy said: "We have little difficulty selling to our existing customers. It's not like that outside of our base."

Source: Datamonitor

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