WD is looking to grow its business in SA.
This was revealed by Khalid Wani, sales director for WD's branded business in the Middle East, African and India, in an interview with ITWeb last week. He added that WD, a Western Digital company, has expanded its focus to the enterprise market, following the acquisition of Hitachi.
"If you look at SA, as an economy, it's growing. Internet penetration in SA is growing at a very fast pace. We believe consumers in SA are looking at more products for storing their information. Overall, SA is a very competitive market, and it's a market that presents us with a lot of opportunities," Wani said.
"So, for us, any market that has an opportunity is important for us, and we have been investing aggressively in SA; not only in terms of resources, but also in making sure that education goes via the channel partners to the end consumer."
According to Wani, though SA is a big market, it's not very complex. WD's distribution strategy is firmly in place and the company operates with the largest distributors in the country, with products available across all the major retail stores, he added.
However, WD does not have immediate plans to set up an office in SA and is using an offshore office to run local operations, Wani noted.
Storage convergence
Wani believes convergence is the biggest storage trend. "The consumer's mindset, when it comes to storage, is no longer just about storing information, but also about how to access that information.
"So storage is now converging into different verticals; for example, consumers are now looking at being able to access their home storage anywhere in the world, using their smartphones, tablets and so forth. So we see some convergence coming in as consumers are looking at carrying the highest volume of data whenever they are travelling."
He noted that individuals face different challenges when storing information. Consumers are increasingly looking for external storage solutions to store their critical data; data recovery services are expensive and consumers don't want to run the risk of losing important data.
Wani stressed that the majority of consumers generate a lot of content via smartphones, digital cameras and other mobile devices, and that external storage is the easiest way for consumers to store this data.
According to Wani, the majority of file-sharing services, like Dropbox and Google Drive, limit consumers in different ways. "At a certain point, you do have to use their services free of charge. But you would find out that consumers have so much content to store - they've got movies, music pictures - and it will become extremely expensive for consumers to use such services.
"Imagine a consumer wanting to have one terabyte of a public cloud service from Dropbox, Amazon, etc. The average cost of public cloud to a capacity of a terabyte is roughly $1 200 compared with external storage solutions, which are priced much lower. So consumers are looking at this and I don't think the public cloud offers any significant threat to our business."
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