Deb Dutta

Interview by Daniel Soh, THE AMROP INTERVIEW

Deb Dutta is a senior technology executive with 24 years of experience in business and operations in Asia Pacific and Japan with stints in multinational companies as well as local start-ups. His contributions in organization transformation, rapid sequential business growth, and strategic leadership have generated multi-billion dollar revenue streams across 17 countries.

As an integral member of impactful executive teams, Deb has built successful businesses, strategies, goto-market models, and highperformance multinational teams. He has a proven track record of leading two very successful start-up global companies in Asia Pacific through dramatic growth in revenue, market share, footprint and infrastructure: McAfee and Brocade.

Since January 2004, Deb has been Vice President of the Asia Pacific region for the now US$2.1 billion dollar networking company, Brocade.  Having joined the company in 2001, Deb was promoted twice before his current position.  Deb and his team have since grown the Asia Pacific operations of the organization faster than the market and the competition.

Founded in 1995, Brocade is an industry leader in providing reliable, high-performance network solutions that help the world’s leading organizations transition smoothly to a virtualized world where applications and information reside anywhere. Headquartered in San Jose, California, the company has approximately 4600 employees worldwide and serves a wide range of industries and customers in more than 160 countries. For more information, visit www.brocade.com.

Amrop: What brought you into Brocade? How was the business back then and what is it now? Continue reading »

Interview by Yogesh Gupta, Channel World

Yogesh Gupta of Channel World (CW): Enterprises are assailed with datacenter architecture story by vendors including HP, Juniper, Cisco, and Brocade (through Brocade One). Isn’t the pitch becoming confusing for partners?

Deb Dutta: Whenever there is a paradigm shift or emergence of new technology maps in the industry, credibility is very important. We have trailing blaze of glory in the SAN space (across datacentre) for over one and half decades. I don’t want to talk about Cisco or Juniper, but if you look from SAN perspective, we have a dominant market share of over 70 percent. The fact that 14 out of 17 standards are either authored or co-authored by us speaks of our obvious level of influence and leadership in this space. CIOs of larger enterprises do understand the advantages of datacentre architecture and there is high level of awareness amongst them.

CW: What does this technology shift mean for Brocade and its competitors in networking industry? Continue reading »

By Amit Roy Choudhury, The Business Times

BROCADE and Dell have announced the availability of a new range of open, standards-based solutions for data centre customers in Asia.

Mr Dutta: ’We are offering customers choice … The power of choice cannot exist with a closed, proprietary model.’

Deb Dutta, Brocade’s Asia Pacific VP, told BizIT that both companies firmly believe that next-generation, virtualised data centres should be open and standards-based. In keeping with this, the two companies have announced the availability in Asia of a new range of networking solutions under Dell’s PowerConnect B-Series.

The solutions support a dynamic infrastructure and optimisation solutions for virtualised environments. According to Brocade, the solutions enable customers to deploy and manage an efficient data centre as well as respond nimbly to changing requirements as their networks evolve – all through a modular, integrated platform that is interoperable with the existing network architecture. Continue reading »

Interview by Mark Braithwaite of MOSAIC, Global Executive Search

Globally, Brocade owns more than 80% of each of the markets they play in. They serve these markets by connecting and managing all types of data. They have 2500 employees and US$1.4bn in annual revenue. Indian born Deb Dutta, joined Brocade in Singapore 6 years ago. He was the 12th employee in the region. Today, Deb’s team is 180 strong and growing.

Mark Braithwaite: “Tell me about the evolution of your business model in APJ?”

Deb Dutta: “We first went to market selling solely through OEM’s, this model still exists, but over time, we have put in a very strong interface with the customer. This is the sell direct, fulfill indirect model at its best. We drove preference & architecture with the customer but the fulfillment happened through our partners. The third stage of our go to market evolution has been driven by the dynamic nature of the data, its growth and customer challenges around cost, complexity & compliance which called for the need for an even greater involvement with the customer in the form of high end services and on-going consulting assignments. We built our services business a year and a half ago. This is now one of our fastest growing business lines. The channel partner now sells both the product and the services for us. This strategy has deepened the value we provide to customers, strengthened our position as a supplier and enhanced our ability to leverage a partner led model.”

MB: “Which Asian countries do you see as the biggest growth markets for you going forward?” Continue reading »