Technology Reseller - v17 2019

01732 759725 storage 34 you sell a total solution, and services as part of that, it’s a very different margin- driven sale, which is why many have been very keen to enter that space,” explained Edwards. Greater competition A second challenge identified by Edwards is largely the product of Western Digital’s market dominance, especially in HDD. “In the HDD space there are really only three players. We and Seagate each have around 40% share and Toshiba the remaining 20%. So, if someone is buying an HDD, there’s a pretty good chance it will be one of our products. However, there are many more players in the SSD space. You’ve got Intel, you’ve got Samsung, you’ve got Hynex, you’ve got Toshiba, you’ve got Kingston – it’s a much more competitive landscape. One of the with their components team, but also their enterprise organisation and sales teams – and they are often totally different organisations within a distributor. Over the last 12 to 24 months we have done a lot of work with key partners to try to link those divisions together. This has been quite challenging because, due to the way commissions are set up for distributor sales organisations, it might mean only one team getting the commissionable sale. There has been a lot of complexity around that. “The key thing is that distributors are able to see the added value that we bring. By owning 70%-80% of the barn, as we often do with these storage products, we enable them to make nicer margin on the WD product range, compared to the relatively low margins they are used to making on the components side. When ...continued Exertis Hammer expands Western Digital offering Exertis Hammer has expanded its Western Digital offering after gaining distribution rights for IntelliFlash across EEA, South Africa and Israel. The agreement gives the specialist value-add distributor the right to distribute the entire Western Digital Data Centre Systems (DCS) range, which includes IntelliFlash, for mission critical, virtualised and primary workloads, delivered as hybrid, all-flash or all-NVMe storage systems. The range expansion complements Exertis Hammer’s existing relationship as a distributor of high-capacity and high- performance drives and platforms for software-defined storage environments, including servers, JBODs and JBOFs. Paul Silver, Senior Director EMEA DCS Sales at Western Digital, said: “As Western Digital forges its Data Centre Systems business, we are expanding our reach through world-class partners. Exertis Hammer holds an established position of being at the forefront of storage technology distribution, and we believe that this is a powerful partnership to grow a new base of customers, as well as reaching out to existing ones with a compelling new element to our portfolio.” Adam Blackwell, General Manager for Software Defined Solutions at Exertis Hammer, said: “We are thrilled about the opportunity to employ our established trusted advisor ethos to the full Western Digital DCS portfolio, and excited about the opportunities the IntelliFlash range presents for us and our customers. We have had an excellent relationship with Western Digital for many years, which is a great foundation for this new chapter of our partnership together.” The DCS business unit of Western Digital is a leading provider of datacentre infrastructure solutions for enterprise, private cloud and edge datacentre environments. Its full datacentre portfolio supports workloads across all application tiers, from business-critical to long-term archive, and includes: IntelliFlash hybrid, all-flash and NVMe storage systems; ActiveScale petabyte-scale hybrid cloud object storage system; OpenFlex NVMe-over-Fabric (NVMf) open composable infrastructure; Ultrastar sever and storage platforms; Ultrastar memory extension drive; and Ultrastar datacentre-class HDDs and SSDs. www.exertishammer.com challenges we’ve got to be very aware of is that as a business converts from HDD to flash, which we are beginning to see especially in the desktop and client space, we must make sure it’s a Western Digital SSD product that’s replaced in those systems, otherwise we run the risk that our revenues will decrease,” he said. “That’s one of the focuses we have as an organisation, and we are working actively with our partners to get across the message that that business has to convert to a WD product. We have such a large share of the hard drive industry in certain markets – in surveillance, we have over 70% market share across the region; in NAS drives, we have over 60% market share across the region – and as some of those markets transition to flash, as they will, we have got a massive task to make people understand that Western Digital is also their ‘go to choice’ on the flash side, which today people probably associate more with Samsung and Intel.” Whether undertaken for defensive or offensive reasons, Western Digital’s portfolio expansion should enable it to face the future with confidence. www.westerndigital.com As a business converts from HDD to flash, we must make sure it’s a Western Digital SSD product that’s replaced in those systems