Hewlett Packard Philippines Corp. will launch in September a new line of network storage products geared towards the small and medium business segment, a company official said Tuesday.
This follows a similar announcement made a day earlier by HP’s StorageWorks division in the U.S. The new products will compete for the same market with those from EMC Corp.
In an interview with reporters, Marie Eulalie Cruz, HP Philippines product manager for network storage and solutions, confirmed that an announcement will likewise be made locally this September.
Cruz, however, did not give any more details about the upcoming launch, although he echoed similar statements by HP’s U.S. storage unit that the new products are designed to “simplify” storage-related tasks for users.
HP is reportedly spending US$20 million in a global marketing campaign promoting its new storage line. In the Philippines, HP competes with EMC and IBM Corp. in the storage segment market.
HP Philippines, meanwhile, is now putting a more aggressive marketing spin to its own information lifecycle management (ILM), even though rival EMC has been actively advocating ILM locally for a long time.
“We never really launched it aggressively in the last two years,” said Cruz, referring to HP’s ILM campaign in the Philippines. “But now we have the solutions in place; we are beefing up are partners and talking to key local customers.”
The company is also engaging local customers through workshops with IT managers that allow them to discover what needs to be prioritized when it comes to storage.
For most users, the need for storage arises when databases get too large and transferring it to a dedicated storage box can free up resources for better application performance, such as email archiving, for example.
With several factors, among them compliance to industry standards like Sarbanes-Oxley that requires organizations to store digital information, Cruz said it’s only now most local companies are beginning to understand ILM better.
HP defines ILM as “a means to capture, manage, retain and deliver information access according to relevance,” said Bart Davidoff, HP’s ILM business development manager for Southeast Asia.
