Western Digital strives to lead its partner ecosystem

Khalid Wani, Direct Channel Sales, Western Digital India, says, “People today want a storage device that matches their lifestyle: compact, snazzy, yet reliable. From listening to our customers, we keep innovating and introducing attractive products for them. Our award-winning My Passport line is now enhanced with the slimmest 5TB portable hard drive in the WD brand portfolio. As the study points out, people find the process of backing up data inconvenient and time-consuming. Our new My Passport addresses this concern and offers automatic back up, where a user can just pick the time and frequency to back up important files from their system onto their My Passport drive.

Data is at the heart of everything today. A consumer realizes the importance of their data and explores attractive options to save it. Eighty-three percent of the Indian customers are likely to take a backup of their PC data in the future. Western Digital is uniquely positioned to offer just the right products for the varied needs of the consumers.

A research was conducted by Western Digital in November 2019, to find out the reasons behind losing data. They found out that that one in every two respondents does not take complete back up of their content , eighty-four percent of the audience blamed a virus attack, system crash, or a forgotten password as the main reasons for losing their data.

As per the report, 42% of the respondents cited the paucity of time and the tediousness of the data backup process as the key deterrents for backing up their content. Among the researched group, only 24% of females and a meagre 18% among the 36-45 age groups backup their data.

In the wake of consumers' behaviours, Western Digital has introduced its newest My Passport, its slimmest 5TB portable hard drive, in the Indian market. The drive features WD Discovery software for WD Security (password protection and 256-bit AES Hardware Encryption), social media and cloud storage import (like Facebook, Dropbox and Google Drive) and WD Drive Utilities. All of the new drives are built with Western Digital reliability and come with a three-year limited warranty.

Western Digital continues to strengthen initiatives for its channel partners in India to help them expand their operations and fortify their success. 

The company has also introduced exciting new rewards programs for its channel partners across all the industry segments that it operates in the country. The newly launched rewards programs include:

SanDisk League of Heroes (SLH): SLH is created for recognizing and rewarding the best performing channel partners in the consumer segment. It will run for the whole year (2020). Each quarter represents a mission consisting of a number of stars that can earn the partners attractive rewards. The SLH program consists of rewards, booster rewards, and medallions that can earn exciting prizes.

Western Digital Elite Partner Promo: This program is for enterprise SIs and VARs who provide complete storage solutions to the customers. It is an annualized rewards program with quarterly rewards based on performance for the channel partners who sell Western Digital Ultrastar HDDs, SSDs and storage platforms and server portfolio that includes our JBOD, JBOFs, Ultrastar Serv24-A, and Ultrastar Serv60+8.

myWD Partner Program: myWD Partner Program is a highly successful rewards program that engages with partners within the IT and surveillance channel. Under this campaign, 6000 partners participate under a time bound, two-way communication based rewards platform and get trained on select, WD-branded products.

“We run one of the strongest and most successful partner programs in the channel today. The key to this is our clarity and a sharp focus on a two-way partnership, and on our mutual success. We continue to reinvent the way that we work with our partners, and it is exciting to see that our efforts are paying off, across our channel partner spectrum,” said Jaganathan Chelliah, Director, Marketing, Western Digital India

Over the years, Western Digital has been consolidating and segmenting its channel partners for growth in key channel networks ranging from mobile retail, IT, surveillance, and enterprise channel networks.

The company is committed to working towards introducing more rewards programs and initiatives designed for the success of its channel partners.