'Efficient data storage a bigger issue than analytics'

India is significant for Sunnyvale, California-headquartered NetApp, a $6.2 billion data storage and management company - 2,000 of its 13,000 employees are based here. NetApp Vice Chairman Tom Mendoza was recently in Mumbai and spoke to G. Seetharaman about the need for focus among IT companies and the challenges in data management. Excerpts:

Given the noise around big data and the revenue potential in analysing that data , do you think NetApp should go beyond its forte of storage?
The amount of data has been enormous for a long, long time. That's not new. One of the things I'm careful about is when people get behind a buzzword. Storage grows five to ten times every five years for an average enterprise and it's important to slow that growth. Why? Because for every dollar you spend on 1 megabyte of storage, you spend $6 to manage it. Even if it's cheap or free, you spend $6.

The average utilisation of storage is 30 per cent while for our customers it's 60 per cent. The problem is there are copies and copies of the same data. About 50 per cent of data is duplicated. Analysing data is important for a segment of the business but we feel the bigger issue is how I store the stuff efficiently that it doesn't go out and how I recover it in a way that lowers my costs. Would we ever get into analytics? That would not be a big stretch from where we are and there are a plenty of companies that do that kind of stuff that would like to be acquired by NetApp. But we'll have to see.

There has been a lot of flux in the IT industry worldwide with customer-facing companies targeting enterprise customers and vice versa. What do you make of this blurring of the lines?
It's important to have a focus. If you look at companies that have failed, most of them do it by getting out of their core competencies and into things they are not very good at. From NetApp's point of view, we are in the data information and storage space, which is growing faster than any other market in technology. The amount of information and what people need and how they need it is rapidly growing. If we continue to innovate and meet customer requirements, we don't need a new business. But that's not true of many companies. They are in markets that have become stagnant, so if they need growth they must find a new market.

I'm very impressed by Amazon, Google and Apple. When they come into a new segment, it's not random, it's based on a lot of research and it all seems to tie in (with their other businesses) in some way. I recently called on some giant conglomerates in India. That's (becoming a conglomerate) another way to build a company. GE historically did that but that doesn't work that well in tech, where you have to have some basis where people understand this is what you do. If Cisco doesn't win in networking, they are not going to be successful regardless of whatever else they do. When you think about Google, it's search. They do maps and other things, but if they ever lost their search business, you wouldn't be talking about them.

What do you think is a serious challenge in data management?
The challenge for IT is this: when we go home and want to find out something about each other we go to Google; if I like music I'll go to Apple (store); if I want photographs, I'll go to Instagram. So, what's happening with CIOs is people are saying they need information on their client (device) instantaneously. Regular companies have to think like them (Apple and Google) and have to provide that service.

What are your plans for India?
Four years back we had 500 people in India (NetApp has 2,000 employees now). I don't know if we will quadruple our headcount in the four years but we will continue to grow. We are discussing plans for our next site. Our Indian team has been on some of the biggest engineering projects in the company. It's not like India gets the low-value stuff. India is the heartbeat of what's making NetApp go.