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The company is aiming at occupying the number two position in the Indian storage market. In an interview with Pragati Simlote of CyberMedia News, Western Digital corp. (WD) enterprise product marketing director Hubbert Smith talks about trends in the storage area and WD’s growth plans in India.
What are the current trends in the enterprise storage arena?
What we found in some research is that the enterprise markets have changed. So adjacent markets like scientific computing, e-commerce, email, web, surveillance, call center, broadcast video and professional audio have grown. These markets were always there but have grown as compared to database and online transaction market. In the past SCSI fiber channels drives were used to service these markets but they were not an optimal fit.
How is WD taking advantage of the changed scenario?
Since markets like scientific computing, e-commerce, email, etc. have grown, we see that the enterprise landscape has changed. We are building different drives optimized for (great) capacity and reliability. We can’t throw away performance but this could just be adequate performance drives instead of absolute performance having adequate vibration tolerance and good power saving. These are the requirements that we are starting to see.
What do enterprises look for while deploying storage solutions?
We researched enterprise customers and asked them a little but about their application and for their most important and less important requirement. The enterprise database and transaction processing, reliability and performance were the top two. Power was a constraint to some extent, but capacity and cost per capacity was a lower constraint.
What are the current trends in the storage arena?
What we found in some research is that the enterprise markets have changed. So adjacent markets like scientific computing, e-commerce, email, web, surveillance, call center, broadcast video and professional audio have grown. These markets were always there but have grown as compared to database and online transaction market.
In the past SCSI fiber channels drives were used to service these markets but they were not an optimal fit. Since these markets have grown, we see that the enterprise landscape has changed. We are building different drives optimized for (great) capacity and reliability. We can’t throw away performance but this could just be adequate performance drives instead of absolute performance having adequate vibration tolerance and good power saving. These are the requirements that we are starting to see.
What kind of market are you eyeing in India?
Software build system is an important market for us in India, as it is the hub of software development. There is a strong drive for channel and system integrators to supply to the requirement of software build. In surveillance and call center, the requirement for the drive is the same. We are building our channel partners and products to serve the call center requirements.
What is your India strategy?
Disk IT server and especially software build market is a strong market for us. We already have a number of partners worldwide as well as some growing partner in India to supply to that market. Surveillance and call center is the other big target market for us locally.
Things are looking positive for us in India. We are investing in the regional market, increasing our staffing and engineering resources. We see a potential here and are focusing on India. We wouldn’t invest in India if we didn’t see significant growth potential here.
The enterprise market has started doing well in India. Lots of our value segment channel partners are focusing on these kind of market segments. And that is helping us to have a concentrated and focused approach. Some partners are specializing in segments with high terabyte kind of requirement like AV, video surveillance, call centers, etc. We are striving to create awareness and demand for our products, growing a healthy channel, etc.
What is your engagement model in India?
We recognize that there are some companies who only want to focus on the big tier 1 MNCs. We don’t see it that way. We see a very healthy channel market. We see differentiated solutions that involve not only hardware, but also services and support and things that regional companies offer and tier 1 MNCs do not offer.
Our competitors appear to be 80 per cent -90 per cent focused on tier 1. We think that the growth, as well as the challenges as well as sustainable businesses is here in the channel.
SMB is going to be a focus segment for us. Here requirement is for small low cost products and our RAID edition 2 (RE2) fits very well here.
There has been a debate going on between tape and disk. Do you think tape will go out?
I think that there is a shift. The use of disk drives and archive related activities is increasing. There are a number of reasons for that. The first is that the cost per GB on drives is coming down, while cost per GB on tape is staying relatively flat. Secondly nature of tape drive is linear that means that it takes a lot of time to get to the last file on the tape. Disk drives do not face this problem.
So I think that it will be a long time that there is a substantial shift like 80:20 (80 per cent disk drive, 20 per cent tape). It will be a while until this happens, but I don’t see why this will not happen.
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