In what way your stint with ‘ACI Infotech’, ‘Cyberstar’ and ‘Kobian’ have equipped you in handling Western Digital’s India operations?
Having worked with channels closely in past, I’ve developed strong understanding and appreciation of the issues, requirements and pain-points of channel partners. WD is a channel-focused company and I’m sure my experience will help me work on channel issues better, and further strengthen the brand WD in India.

Do you think the momentum given at Sharad Srivastava’s time requires some directional change or will continue on the same marketing foundation?
Over the last few years, WD has gained prominence in the Indian market. Innovative marketing initiatives and channel friendly policies have helped WD attain leadership status. I do not intend to make changes to these initiatives & policies but would like to channelize my efforts to continue the momentum that we’ve gained. I’m confident that these policies and practices will make WD a stronger brand in future.
For any company to grow, succeed and sustain it is very important to have a proper distribution and channel network. The company should take care of the profitability of channel partners. This will in turn ensure the success of the company. WD’s utmost priority is to take care of the profitability of the channel partners. We constantly strive to offer more value and services to our partners to sell WD products. This has helped WD to establish as one of the leading brands in India. At WD, we believe that the partners associated with us should succeed and grow with WD equally.

In the category of notebook, do you think that ‘WD Scorpio Blue’ and ‘WD Scorpio Black’ are doing much better than its desktop peers in the country?
Western Digital products have carved their own position in the market. WD Scorpio Blue drives offer high-performance with low power consumption, and cool operation which is perfect for notebooks and other portable devices. WD Scorpio Black is designed with top-of-the-line notebook computers in mind. This high performance drive delivers the capacity and speed needed to supercharge a notebook PC without compromising battery life or quiet acoustics. Features like these also make this drive an outstanding option for compact desktops, external hard drives, gaming systems, and blade servers.

In the desktop HDD realm, do you think the market is showing increasing appetite for high-capacity drives (say 2TB drives)?

The digital revolution has triggered a steady consumption pattern of storage of humongous proportions for downloaded material in homes of Indian consumers. With the increasing impetus on higher storage capacity, hard drives have gained significance in the market as they satisfy the ever increasing consumer appetite for digital content and is at the helm of customers demands. There has been a continued doubling of storage capacity every couple of years, which has helped the hard drive keep its value proposition of low cost and high capacity. Nowadays both enterprise and consumer segment has good demand for high-capacity storage products. As hard drive capacities increase, the power required to run those drives increases as well. WD Caviar Green drives yield an average drive power savings of 4-5 Watts over standard desktop drives making it possible for our energy-conscious customers to build systems with higher capacities and the right balance of system performance, ensured reliability, and energy conservation. It also consumes less current during startup allowing lower peak loads.

In 3.5” category, what are the ideal applicability of models like WD RE3, WD RE4 and WD RE4-GP)?
These drives are high performance enterprise SATA drives designed for business-critical applications. The applicability of these drives are for power-conscious, large-scale data centers. The demand for surveillance solutions is rapidly increasing, especially in public places like railways, airport, hotels, offices, industrial establishments etc, where the need to record/store all the video footage is of utmost importance. The adoption of digital technology is growing rapidly in the surveillance space and the availability of fast, reliable and specialized data storage devices (HDD) for surveillance will only fuel the growth. The electronics surveillance industry has been on an upswing since the past couple of years. Globally, Western Digital has been a pioneer in partnering with the surveillance industry to provide hard-drive based next generation digital systems in the travel, entertainment, banking and other industries. Storage in surveillance is also undergoing a major revolution. SATA I/F based specialized HDDs are finding increasing use in surveillance solutions. WD has a range of specialized SATA I/F drives which are suitable for this market. WD’s AV and RE4 hard drives are widely deployed in surveillance systems.

How much focus is being shed on making WD products much greener?
Environmental sustainability is important to us at WD. The company has realized the increasing need of energy conservation and has introduced a number of products under “Green Power” family in the market. WD has designed eco-friendly GreenPower (GP) hard drives to bring more energy efficient hard drive options to our customers. We’re making a positive impact on the environment by encouraging our customers to consume less electricity.
The GreenPower Family consists of Enterprise drives ‘WD RE4-GP’ for the enterprise class. The WD RE4-GP is one of the industry’s largest green power enterprise hard drives offering 2TB capacity). These GreenPower hard drives yield average drive power savings of 4-5 Watts over competitors’ drives while providing comparable performance. The power savings by one drive equates to reducing CO2 emission by up to 60 kilograms per drive per year—the equivalent of taking your car off the road for 14 days each year. This new platform makes it possible for our energy-conscious customers to build systems with higher capacities and the right balance of system performance, ensured reliability and energy conservation.

How are you tapping this emerging market with your NAS products?
Popularity of home networks is also growing worldwide, with penetration as high as 50 percent in some countries. The Network Attached Storage (NAS) systems make it simple for small offices and workgroups to centralize storage for easy accessibility—both within the network and remotely. The transition of making NAS products from a complex storage solution requires highly technical manpower to handle to a simple plug and play appliances. A company like ours can make this devices a simple plug and play and more affordable for home and SOHO market. . Even SMBs today are looking for a holistic network attached storage solution that allows network sharing and built-in backup capabilities.