McData Opens China Office

Storage networking specialist McData QUOTE NASDAQ:MCDTA> has expanded its Asia-Pacific presence with a new office in Beijing.

“China is an increasingly important and strategic country for McData,” said Unji Kawanishi, McData’s general manager for the region said in a statement.

The Broomfield, Colo., company will use the new office to better support customers, partners and systems integrators in the area. It also has offices in Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Australia.

McData’s hardware, software and services are already available in China through partnerships with big-name vendors EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and StorageTek.

The company, which spun out of Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC, makes hardware and software for highly available, scalable and centrally managed storage area networks aimed at enterprise customers. It also has a services arm.

China is stepping cautiously toward a market economy. With its large population and lack of infrastructure, IT companies have long viewed the populous country as a potentially lucrative market.

And while orders haven’t exploded there (or anywhere else for that matter) to the extent predicted during the boom years of 1990s, some significant deals are beginning to emanate from the country.

For example, last month, UTStarcom said it will sell $114 million of its Internet protocol-based personal access systems (PAS) to China Netcom, which is expanding its broadband network in the Hebei, Shandong and Liaoning provinces.

Such developments are presumably encouraging to McData and others in it sector: the greater the reach of advanced networks, the greater the need for data storage and management.