WD is Focusing on Global Storage Market for Surveillance: Darrin Bulik WD, a Western Digital company, is a long-time innovator and storage industry leader. As a storage technology pacesetter, the company produces reliable, high-performance hard disk drives and solid state drives. a&s India conducted a special interview session with the WD’s management team including Khwaja Saifuddin - Senior Sales Director - Middle East, Africa & South Asia, WD, Darrin Bulik - Director, Product Marketing, WD and Martin Jefferson - Business Unit Director, Datacenter and Digital Video products, WD at Secutech 2015.
BY ANANT JOSHI, a&s INDIA
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Darrin Bulik,
Director, Product Marketing, WD
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Martin Jefferson ,
Business Unit Director, Datacenter and Digital Video products, WD
Tell us about the global storage and surveillance market evolving terms of WD’s perspective?
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Darrin Bulik: There is quite significant growth in the global storage market for surveillance especially on a percentage basis. It depends on the market and the region we are looking at. It is a market we are very focused on as it is a key growing sector because of factors such as: • Transition to IP-based surveillance systems • Promise of planned smart cities in countries such as India • Application-specific products such as WD Purple enabling better quality surveillance video systems
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space.
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As the surveillance industry is highly cluttered, what does WD plan to bring to the table with regards to the Indian/APAC market?
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Darrin Bulik: We closely work with key system manufacturers & designers to understand the customer needs of a system from a storage point of view. That’s how we arrived at WD Purple: to come up with storage that is not a PC hard drive. WD purple is tuned and optimized for surveillance storage.
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Since the launch of WD Purple in last year, what has been the market response to your surveillance specific storage products?
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Darrin response
Bulik: The Market has been very good.
Optimizations we did in WD Purple were able to show performance benefits in a system as compared to the regular desktop hard drives (which cannot record
Martin Jefferson: The response to our purple launch has been beyond our expectations. Our percentage share is clearly higher than any other hard drive manufacturer. WD Purple has a combination of excellent reliability and durability and comes out on top in all aspects of the comparative tests done by customers against the competition. We follow this with good branding. WD Purple equals Surveillance has been a very strong form of branding as people can relate the color to the product.
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How do you plan to target the Smart City and Safe City project segments? Khwaja Saifuddin: We are targeting segments both from bottom and the top. We are in touch with consultants, architects, designers, local bodies, state government and central government, to make them understand and educate them on the importance of storage.
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It’s not only about the cameras or the DVRs or NVRs that you see physically, but everything resides on the hard drive.
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Darrin Bulik: It depends on which market analysis we look at. From a CAGR point of view, it is certainly much higher than other segments like the PC
Senior Sales Director - Middle East, Africa & South Asia, WD
May 2015
What is the growth rate in percentage when we look at the global scenario for the surveillance segment?
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Khwaja Saifuddin,
Other benefit for our partners is from a qualification point of view - Before WD Purple and surveillance HDDs, they would need to get a generic hard drive qualified through a lot of engineering resources. But, by having a surveillance specific product like WD Purple they can focus on that product, get it qualified and use that as the recommended hard drive in their surveillance system.