American Megatrends Inc. (AMI), known for developing PC BIOS, leverages its core competence accumulated through long-term devotion in PC and server systems to actively expand from existing BIOS business into management systems and applications for data centers or cloud server rooms composed of servers. The importance of enterprise storage applications and management is growing with rapid developments in cloud services, big data analytics, and artificial intelligence giving rise to exponential increases in the amount of digital data generated by businesses.
With its Taiwan office in operation for 33 years, AMI made an early start in the development of data storage technologies. Its RAID controller MegaRAID has been market proven. Now AMI provides high-reliability and high-performance storage servers and systems including complete lines of SAN and NAS products under the brand StorTrends. These products are also enthusiastically embraced by customers in North America and India for applications across education, energy, banking, government and healthcare sectors.
Frank Liu, senior associate manager, AMI Taiwan, emphasized that aside from BIOS, AMI has been marketing StorTrends products to North America for many years, securing market presence in the region. StorTrends products are now entering the Taiwan market, offering a very competitive product portfolio and cost advantages especially suited to storage needs by small and medium enterprises with more than 300 employees. AMI hopes to make a fresh start with the marketing of the StorTrends brand in Taiwan.
AMI Taiwan is a medium-size operation with a work force of 600 employees and 85% of them are R&D engineers. This represents a critical advantage enabling AMI StorTrends products to expand into the Taiwan market as many businesses in Taiwan of a similar scale have the same kind of storage needs. In fact, AMI with a global network of branch operations has already developed important use case examples for Taiwan customers to draw from and gain more in-depth understanding on the application scenarios.
StorTrends targets SMEs and education sector in Taiwan
The Taiwan industry has been well known for their strength in OEM/ODM manufacturing of electronics such as PCs and servers. Frank Liu stated that AMI has maintained long-standing and close ties with the Taiwan electronics supply chain and ecosystem. Their outstanding OEM/ODM design and development capabilities combined with AMI's software and firmware technologies give StorTrends products differentiating competitiveness and are also the major force driving AMI's expansion to develop its own brand. In addition to storage equipment, AMI also offers complete virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions.
Frank Liu spots a scenario where AMI's VDI solutions can be put to good use - enterprise and education where large quantities of computers are used and each is configured with a large storage space, especially computer centers at schools and computer learning labs. VDI can significantly reduce management time and costs by replacing the computers with virtual desktops and, in particular, allowing flexible allocations of hard disk space, which can greatly cut down upfront hardware investments by businesses or schools and lower the barrier for users.
Furthermore, system integrators or solution distributors can provide users long-term service contracts, for example, free software upgrades over a three-year period, allowing users access to the latest version software. Such a mutually beneficial model of system sales and services replacing the traditional way of one-time hardware sales can help build long-lasting customer relationships. This is a win-win-win strategy for users, system vendors and the technology developer AMI.
Putting in continuing efforts toward the Taiwan market, AMI actively takes part in industrial alliances and is a leading member of Open Infrastructure Taiwan A-Team (OITA), which endeavors to broaden Taiwan's horizons in the storage equipment space and engage more active participation by the Taiwan electronics ecosystem and supply chain. AMI's StorTrends line satisfies diverse needs by enterprises arising from their digital transformation by providing network storage capabilities with centralized storage, simplified management, sustained operation, disaster recovery, high efficiency and virtualization support in addition to value-added features such as data compression, data deduplication and optimized data transfer over WAN. In 2018, AMI further adds multiple solutions to the StorTrends line including hybrid flash arrays, all-flash arrays, dual-controller storages. In particular, it offers storage systems for business applications of artificial intelligence with NVMe support, which will create more synergized benefits.
AMI plans to consolidate its sales channels in Taiwan this year and is now working on the final details of cooperation. It has also allotted resources to build different use case examples to help AMI channel partners develop a new sales model different from before. At Computex 2018, AMI will showcase its products at booth L1332 on the fourth floor at Nangang Exhibition Center. AMI customers, partners and Computex visitors are all welcome to the AMI booth to see StorTrends products in action.
Frank Liu, senior associate manager, AMI Taiwan
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