Hitachi Data Systems' aggressive plans

The move comes with a new country manager, Watcharasit Santisuknirun, who has been in charge of Hitachi Data System (HDS)'s Thailand operation since January 4.

He said that in 2010 his company would focus more on four potential market segments: government, banking, education and manufacturing. It will increase its marketing and sales channels by appointing more business partners and will recruit more distributors. At present it has only one business partner, Stream IT Consulting.

"This year we will also increase our internal human resources, but we have not yet finalised how many presales, sales and post-sales staff we will need," Watcharasit said.

Hitachi Data Systems (Thailand) is expected to record higher growth than the rest of the market this year because of the economic rebound and the fact that fastest growth is in digital content, especially unstructured data, which is growing at an annual rate of 120 per cent around the world, he said.

Growth in unstructured data is mainly driven by digital media broadcasting, education, including e-learning and online courseware, and deployment of rapid closed-circuit television.

Hitachi Data Systems' Asean vice president and general manager Ravi Rajendran said that Thailand had the highest potential for HDS in the region.

"Our main strategy in concentrating more on the Thai market is to educate the market and our customers and partners about HDS storage solutions and core technologies and services, including virtualisation - both server and storage virtualisation - and dynamic provisioning," Rajendran said.

He said most organisations were using only 30 to 35 per cent of their storage capacity, so HDS would educate them about using their existing resources.

Private cloud computing is an area with potential that HDS plans to tap into with its total storage solutions. The strategy is expected to increase both the company's revenue and its share of the Thai market.

"We aim to be number one in the Thai market in the near future. Now, we are in the top three, according to International Data Corporation Thailand. With our global business strategy shifted to services, rather than 'the moving box' over the past two years, along with local management led by a new country manager, we will accelerate to achieve our goal," Rajendran said.