It may be mentioned that there is a shortage of skilled professionals in storage industry with the requirement set to go up to an estimated 2.5 lakh professionals in the next 2 years. To negate this deficiency SNIA India has planned to spread their educational training network across the country through formation of efficient franchise network. Franchises are already operating in New Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai, with the next batch of institutes set to open in Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Pune soon.

These franchise institutes will offer storage related educational and training courses to students and professionals besides offering them hands-on experience also.

SNIA India is aiming to create around 1000 SNIA certified storage professionals by the end of next year.

Another major step from SNIA India is to establish a pool of trainers. A pool of 20 trainers has been already trained under the "train the trainer" program this year as India needs trainers who are capable in undertaking specialized training program to produce skilled professionals.

Explaining their strategies on education initiatives, Bala Guna, Director of Education Initiatives for SNIA India said, “Our first phase of implementing storage education franchises has taken off well with finalization of franchises in some of the metro cities. We are very confident that this initiative will be able to fill some gap between demand and supply of certified storage professionals.”

A non-profit organization, SNIA India spans virtually the entire storage industry in India. It has a large member community encompassing individual, corporate, end-users, partner and IT vendors. The governing body consists of senior managers from national and MNCs. Technical Work Groups (TWG) of SNIA are working on various storage initiatives like Green Storage, XAM, SMI-S etc.