WD – growing from strength to strength

Subroto Das,
Director - India & South Asia,
WD

In a tête-à-tête with VARINDIA, Subroto Das, Director – India & South Asia, WD, recounts the company’s future plans, latest innovations and strategies to help business grow.

ICT is a buzz word that will be a key driver in expanding businesses. In this backdrop, how is WD looking at tapping this opportunity?

The ICT sector is integral to the economy for a developing nation like ours as the most radical innovation happens here. For Indian businesses to compete globally, state-of-the-art IT hardware can sustain quality of the deliverables and enable the business to compete on operating expenditures with its international peers. WD endeavours to support these organizations by delivering world-class solutions that address their unique needs at a competitive price. At WD, we tackle storage for this segment keeping in mind the needs of these organizations. We are catering to the storage needs of large and small enterprises through our range of enterprise hard drives and NAS storage solutions for a SOHO (Small office/Home office) environment. The balance of features, cost and quality are the major factors when we cater to this segment. Also “scalability” of the solutions to meet the potential rapid growth, change and “mobility” are some core features we focus on.

What are your plans to reach out to the enterprise segments?

WD offers specialized enterprise storage drives such as XE, RE and SE for data centers, mission-critical environments, NAS/SAN, surveillance and cloud storage. Additionally, WD provides entry-level NAS solutions and centralized backup appliances for this segment. Our approach will be to drive volumes from small enterprises and data center storage applications by offering specialized storage devices for the most common enterprise applications ranging from high-density performance storage for large-scale enterprise to a simple home office NAS set-up. We enable our customers to overcome their most common pain points, that is, a shortage of IT staff for maintenance or efficient data management with products such as our Sentinel NAS solution. We also tailor-make our hard drives to suit the usage requirements of these very niche customers. Our efforts to reach out to Indian enterprises are directed through “vertical segment” marketing. We will also invest further in educating customers about our usage-optimized solutions. 

What are your views on using the social media? Is it only an opportunity or is it equally disruptive?

Social media commentary is one of the biggest, quickest and most insightful sources of data a business can study today. The control of relationship has shifted on the customer’s side and as people are voicing their opinions and making recommendations on what to buy, read, eat or do, it makes a business case for brands to engage, interact, and maintain a healthy relationship with every “fan” or “friend”. Each Tweet or Facebook post shares a story which helps us to understand and serve our customers better. WD has effectively leverage social media to listen to the voice of the customer in real time and work on their feedback in offering more suited products and services. WD is very active on popular social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Our updates on the “WD India” Facebook page reach out to about 1.35 lakh fans daily, educating consumers and resellers alike on the latest WD products and engaging features of these products. We also address consumer concerns and tend to technical queries related to our products on these social sites. Getting our processes online ensures that we reach out to our entire network of resellers and customers in real-time and tend to service request in the shortest possible time.

What are your plans to integrate the VAR community in terms of distribution management across the geography?

The channel partner’s role in taking the brand to the end-consumer is as crucial as ever. Aligning the vendor’s messaging and key strategies with those of the partners is still important in capturing the essence of the brand at the point-of-sale. We already work closely with our VAR community and programmes like myWD enhance that experience. We try our best to stay on top of the channel’s expectations and create a win-win proposition with our partners. The latest insights from the channel on pricing, availability, SKUs and other critical factors affecting their business are evaluated at our end on a quarterly basis. Depending on this analysis and prevailing market conditions, we may revisit our commercial terms for the partners’ benefit. We invest a significant amount of resources in directly engaging with our partners. We regularly reach out to them for feedback on the prevailing market and tweak our strategies accordingly, when necessary. We also regularly train and update our partners on our products. We show them customer value points in a product, thereby creating a healthy situation for all.

What would be your key messages to the loyal partners/customers of WD?

We recognize that channel partners are faced with the challenge of evolving with the demands of the fast-paced industry, as well as the go-to-market strategies of leading vendors. But there is also an opportunity for them to step up and cater to the huge demand with a sensibly-priced basket of storage devices. WD as a company will increasingly offer differentiated storage products and solutions in the internal, external and SMB segments to its partners, which will enhance their experience and value-for-money with WD.

How do you see the business from cloud in this fiscal?

WD offers a comprehensive range of hard drives and appliances designed specifically for data center and Cloud environments which we are pitching to customers. Since data is being generated at a pace that will outstrip the available storage capacity, we expect Cloud storage to continue its current pace of growth. 

moumita@varindia.com