Western Digital aims to achieve double-digit growth in India

Western Digital Corporation, a global leader in the storage solution industry with a total turnover of $17.7 billion, has said it will register double-digit growth in India.

Ganesh Guruswamy, Senior Vice President of Western Digital Flash Product Group, said that India is witnessing double-digit growth in the storage industry combining both hard disk and solid storage.

“I think a couple of segments are growing pretty rapidly, especially the online, ecommerce web tech companies and business providers in the cloud service and high-performance computing. The banking industry and the smart city project provide the opportunity for storage for video surveillance,” he said.

Guruswamy said the company’s storage, especially on the solid state drive, provides the kind of performance and power efficiency needed where companies are working on artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The company has employees 1,200 people in India at its product development and R&D centre. “We continue to grow on the needs of the business and the project. We will hire 300 to 400 people in over a year’s time,” he said.

According to IDG, the Indian external storage market witnessed de-growth of 5.9% year-on-year (in vendor revenue) and stood at $64.4 million in Q2 2016. Tech Si Research report states that the India data storage market to grow by CAGR of 7% in 2021.

He also pointed out that the company continues to invest in 3D NAN flash technology.
“It is a breakthrough technology. We are the first to shift 64-bit layer into the market. And then, we are also working on the next storage-class memory which is RE Ram, which is again something that we are going to try into the market in terms of storage-class memories as well,” he said.

When asked about the engagement with the government, he said, “In the large government projects, we are looking at engaging through the large system integrator companies. The government projects are not just providing storage, they include compute, storage, network and managed services. So most of these projects are executed by large system integrators,” he said.