Technology Reseller - v17 2019

technolog y reseller.co.uk Storage 33 Ultrastar Serv60 interior Part two of our interview with Nigel Edwards, Vice President EMEAI Sales at Western Digital Corporation “The big growth areas over the last years, which will continue, are what we call the I4, the hyperscale accounts – Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft – and their datacentres. The growth we see in the datacentre space is astronomical. These guys’ storage requirement is growing at a rate of 50-60% per annum. People don’t delete anything so the amount of storage they need is tremendous. “That’s one of the key areas. The other is the mobility market – the market for embedded flash. A lot of the world is still increasing its mobile phone adoption rate, and the growth we expect to see in emerging markets like India and sub- continental Africa is massive. In those areas everyone lives on their phone or, in many cases, two phones. They have traditionally not been smartphone devices, but that is changing, and we are seeing massive adoption of flash technology either embedded into those devices or added via a microSD slot. That embedded space is a huge area of growth.” Total storage solutions Edwards points out that three or four years ago, Western Digital reacted to some of these trends by re-positioning itself as a provider of total solutions rather than just the storage part. “We initially released some JBOD (just a bunch of disks) and JBOF (just a bunch of flash) products – dumb devices, large dense boxes of storage. But over the last In last month’s issue we learnt how Western Digital Corporation has rationalised its product offering and streamlined its distribution strategy, as it continues to evolve from a storage components supplier into a broad-reach data technology company. Here, in part two of our interview with Nigel Edwards, Western Digital Corporation’s Vice President EMEAI Sales, we find out more about the challenges and opportunities facing the company and its channel partners. The last 12 months have not been easy for Western Digital, which has had to contend with greater competition, big declines in flash pricing and a more difficult global business environment, but Edwards suggests that diversification and expansion of the company’s product base mean it is well placed to weather these storms and profit from long-term trends including increased mobility and data growth, especially in the cloud. “In the past, a lot of our business flowed through the traditional strategic OEMs of HP, Dell, EMC, Lenovo. But now we touch so many areas of business and so many industries – the NAND flash side is expanding into the internet of things; flash is moving into everything; we are working heavily with the automotive industry with autonomous driving; flash is going into microwaves and kettles – you wouldn’t believe the different areas we are engaged in compared to five or six years ago,” he said. few years, we have introduced some really revolutionary JBOD and JBOF products that have gained a lot of success across the globe, and we have continued to progress and now have released storage servers that actually compute. We acquired Tegile and we have our own Activescale organisation selling multi-petabyte object storage systems. We’ve really started to move into fully functioning storage subsystems, rather than just selling components, and that’s an area where we expect to see significant revenue growth over the next 5-10 years,” he said. While the diversity of Western Digital’s portfolio is a source of strength, Edwards admits that it does also create difficulties. “One challenge for me and the team is staying up to date with all the areas we now touch as a corporation, from selling NAND components at an embedded level right the way through to large scale systems. Although we are segregated in some areas, we expect our sales organisation to have knowledge and understanding of all areas of our product portfolio. So, one of our biggest challenges is just to keep up”, he said. Evolving partnerships The breadth and complexity of Western Digital’s product portfolio poses difficulties for Western Digital’s distribution and reseller partners too. “Before, there were clear, discrete areas: we would sell the products; distributors would stock the products; resellers would buy those products and they would sell them into generic, standard areas. Now, the Internet of Things has opened up so many other areas that our channel partners are, in some cases, having to set up new organisations and new teams. “Also, because in the past we were predominantly a components supplier – for hard drives or for flash – we used to work only with distributors’ components purchasing teams. Now, as we start to expand our portfolio, we want to work Follow the leader II We’ve really started to move into fully functioning storage subsystems, rather than just selling components, and that’s an area where we expect to see significant revenue growth Nigel Edwards Continued...