Iomega to target Indian market for Zip drives

Chennai: Armed with its latest network-attached servers (NAS) and 750-MB Zip drive, the $834-million-turnover Iomega Corporation, a global major in portable data storage, is looking at the Indian market with renewed interest.

NAS, with capacities starting from 120 GB and going up to 480GB, also has features like hot-swappable drives, RAID 5 and RAID 5+ hot spare file protection, targeted at small- and medium-sized companies.

Iomega regional director (Asia Pacific) Richard Lim says the entry-level model will be priced around $1,300 and will go up to $7,000. Iomega launched NAS in Japan, Korea, Singapore and Australia sometime back and will now be introduced in India, Dubai, Malaysia and Hong Kong.

With CD-RW eating into its Zip drive sales, Iomega recently launched its 750-MB Zip drive. The new product can store as much data as a CD-ROM, a handicap the company faced till now.

Agreeing that the competition is severe, Iomega senior business development manager (Asia South) Sanjeev Gupta says: “CD-RW is fine for giving out information on a CD, but the Zip drive is for storing data for yourself for future use.”

While CD-RW scores over the Zip drive on a couple of counts like costs and capacity, it falters on the reliability and security front when compared with the latter. Hard-read errors and miscompares (when the data is copied wrongly) are common in CD-RW technology. Further, CD-RW is a bit cumbersome to use as compared to the Zip drive. Similarly, the Zip drive is password-protected and is more secure.

Gupta says his company targets to achieve an attachment rate of 6 per cent (connecting the Zip drive to 6 per cent of the total PCs sold in India) this year. The ultimate target is to achieve an attachment rate of 10 per cent.

“To achieve that we will have to educate PC-users (individuals and small corporates) about the importance of data storage devices, and we will shortly start doing that,” says Gupta. Iomega has Zip drives with capacities of 100 MB, 250 MB and 750 MB.

For the company the Asia Pacific region contributed around 6 per cent to the total turnover of the company. And the first half of this year saw sales growing at 10 per cent. “Future growth is expected from Indian and Chinese markets,” sums up Lim.