"We as a company offer the broadest product portfolio to the channel partners"

The collective growth that Western Digital has had over the last couple of years is quite significant. The company is very optimistic about FY20 as an opportunity. In a chat with VARINDIA, Khalid Wani, Director, Channel Sales, India - Western Digital shares that the market in India is continuing to grow in various segments, not only from consumer demand perspective, but also a lot from what is happening from an infrastructure development perspective -  

With the demand for storage growing, how do you see the channel getting benefited? 

The only people that can benefit out of the growing storage marketis the channel because you know our entire business in India is channel dependent; we only work through our distributors and our reseller partners.We do not work directly with any of our end customers.So, whatever business growth we are expecting in India as a market will happen through our channel partners.So, we expect our channel partners to benefit from the revenue growth opportunity that comes along with it.

Can you brief about the positioning of different channel for both Western Digital and SanDisk? 

Depending upon what product portfolio we are talking about, we have got a specialized or specific channel focused towards that. When you look at surveillance as a segment, we very closely work with the surveillance system integrators and large surveillance infrastructure deployment partners.Again in our flash business, we work with the mobility channel, which are predominantly the stores that sell mobile phones and mobile phone accessories.When you look at all other products, whether it is an external hard drive or an internal hard drive or surveillance products, we work very closely with the traditional IT channel. We also work with very closely with etail,LFRs and regional retail customers pan India.

What are the unique strategies for the channel to make profit from Western Digital?

We believe that as a company, we offer the broadest product portfolio to the channel partners which they can capitalize on. A channel partner can look at our entire product portfolio, ranging from edge to our core products and decide which segment he needs to engage in. That offers a significant opportunity for them to upsell their businesses or upsell within their businesses.The channel can benefit from both revenue and margin perspective by concentrating on products that we have. It could be from as small as a USB product all the way to our high end surveillance and enterprise products that we offer.