Cloud Is A Key Growth Market For Seagate In India

While the PC market might have declined, there are lots of new opportunities cropping up, both for hard drives and solid state drives in India. We had a face to face interview with Seagate’s Global Sales Head, BS Teh to understand the company’s plans for the Indian market, key target industries and future plans around SSDs and HDDs. Here’s the full interview.

- Anil Chopra

What is your plan and roadmap for the enterprise IT market in India? The market has historically been dominated by big branding OEMs like Dell, HP, Lenovo. We work with them to ensure that our product is there.

The second market, though not as big, is the local integrated solution providers. There are not a lot of local companies playing in this space anymore.

Our third focus area is cloud, and I believe India has a huge market for it, once of course all the bandwidth and other issues are addressed. It would be a large market and that is really all about education and partnership with the local service providers like Reliance. Our focus on the cloud space starts and ends with products. We have to ensure that we provide the right products that our cloud customers need. We do this by getting into an engineering type of engagement with cloud service providers and work with them to optimize our drives’ performance to their workload characteristics. For this, we focus on power consumption, size, and weight of our drives, as well as optimization of our firmware.

Which other growth verticals are you targeting in India?

We are also very bullish about growth in the consumer market. Though PC penetration rates in India are still very low, the sale of smartphones has gone through the roof, which puts more content generating devices into the market. This generates more data and translates into more opportunities for us by having sufficient external drives, NAS boxes, internal drives, etc.

The Creative Professionals or Bollywood is another hot focus area for us.

WHAT ABOUT OTHER USE CASES LIKE SURVEILLANCE, NAS DRIVES?