Servers are now within your reach

Servers are beconing increasingly affordable for Indian small- and medium-enterprises (SMEs).

Not surprising, given the fact that the annual IT spend of Indian SMEs is around Rs 3,400 crore on IT products and services and purchase of servers is fast picking up.

About 10 million organisations can be classified as SMEs and these organisations, predicts IDC, will keep on spending even as the Indian domestic IT Market continues to remain the fastest growing in the Asia-Pacific Region and is predicted to grow by 21.5 per cent in 2007 to touch Rs 75,891 crores.

IT vendors like HP and Sun are offering server technologies that till now where restricted or available only to the enterprise segment. For instance, IT hardware giant HP launched a new line of server products targeted at SMEs.

The integrity rx2660 entry-class servers and BL860c blade servers provide SMEs an enterprise class performance with virtualisation capabilities at a starting price point of Rs 2 lakh. These rack-mountable servers not only give flexibility to scale up but allow the creation of 54 virtual machines.

Kamal Dutta, Country Business Manager Business Critical Servers HP says, "The SME market continues to show very impressive growths and it also realises that IT is the key enabler for efficiency and effectiveness."

He added that issues like power consumption, cooling and floor space are concerns among SMEs too. Besides these servers support operating systems (OS) like HPunix11i, Red Hat, Suse Linux, Open VMS and Windows.

But are SMEs ready to adopt technologies like virtualisation? Yes says K P Unnikirishnan Director Strategic Alliances, Sun Microsystems, "Today SMEs realise that technology is necessary for competitive advantage. Rather many of the SMEs that we work with already have their mission critical applications running on Risc-based (Risc stands for Reduced Instruction Set Code) servers." The SME segment constitutes 40 per cent of the company's India revenues.

However, targeting SMEs means a whole new strategy and it's just not about getting the price points down. For instance, Sun's entry level Risc-based servers, targeted at medium businesses, starts at a price point of Rs 3-4 lakh whereas their x64-based Galaxy servers start from Rs 70,000-80,000. Apart from this, the companies also give leasing and financing options to business.

HP for its integrity servers has not only brought the price point to Rs 2 lakh (which generally start from Rs 5 lakh onward) but is also offering a 3-year warranty delivered by HP with finance and lease option and has new strategies.