Condo Protego, a value-added reseller focused on storage and data protection, is riding on the crest of the growth wave in storage market, and says there is a sea-change in the way businesses perceive storage.
“Business leaders in the Middle East are increasingly determined to move away from the notion of data storage as a diffuse, overwhelming burden to embrace it as an integral part of a business strategy driven by information visibility and accessibility,” says 
Calthorpe believes that the era of information being dumped and dispersed across multiple servers and mainframes is long gone, and business leaders are rightly looking for solutions that are faster, more efficient and, above all, safer.
He says the regional storage market is growing rapidly, even when many other market segments have struggled during the economic downturn. While the average storage utilisation levels hover around 30 percent in most enterprises, Calthorpe says some users have learned to use storage optimally. “Companies buy big lumps of storage without being scientific about what they need it for and smart ones buy based on project by project basis by working out how much capacity they need.”
Calthorpe says his company unique value proposition is its consultative approach. “We work with two major vendors – EMC and Symantec. We try to understand what the customer challenge is and then a recommend a solution to address it. We don’t want to sell anything that we can’t support completely, because we are involved right from the design stage to implementation and post-sales support.”
Condo Protego, which sees huge opportunities around virtualisation, backup and recovery, works very closely with its partners to cash in on these trends. “We are a signature partner of EMC, the highest level of partnership and is one among the only partners who buy directly from them in the UAE. We are also a master specialist partner for Symantec for the MENA region, and deal with all of their availability product lines.”
Being a service-enabled partner, Condo Protego is now eyeing opportunities outside of the UAE and plans to get itself more aligned with the product roadmap of its vendor partners to further explore the opportunities in the data storage market.
