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Rajesh Khurana
Country Manager, India and Saarc
Seagate Technology
The explosive growth in digital devices, applications and content is astounding.
Consumers now drive much of this growth. While businesses and enterprises continue to be the largest consumers of storage in terms of volumes, the home now outpaces business in terms of rate of growth. When consumers generate highly personal and irreplaceable content, such as photos and videos, they need simple-to-use, comprehensive and secure storage solutions that can help safeguard that content and make it available anytime, anywhere. Security, data protection and simplicity are integral to the powerful products and solutions that customers now require. Whether it is enterprise computing or mobile applications, customers are telling us that they want to keep their valuable data safe, secure and accessible. That was the message of 2008 for storage vendors.
We also saw the emergence of new vertical markets as storage consumers are now poised to grow exponentially in India. The video surveillance-security segment is one such. Constantly growing over the last year or so, digital video surveillance systems are rapidly becoming ubiquitous. Recent threat perceptions have only added to that market. Video surveillance systems, whether deployed in the public or private sector, rely on hard drive storage to house their vast quantities of video data.
Also emerging is the white-box storage solutions segment. Specifically, this refers to the backup requirements for managed and networked storage solutions catering to lower-end SMB and small network offices—those where the number of users is 16-20. Similar value-added solutions may see growing markets during the year.
In spite of a somewhat weaker market for IT in general during 2008, all the trends for digital storage in the long-term indicate significant growth.
Digital lifestyle
Across the Asia Pacific, digital content is an increasingly important part of people’s lives. Whether it is music, videos, photos or games, more and more people are enjoying the benefits of the digital lifestyle, which means digital storage plays a crucial role in their daily lives. We are also seeing a range of new consumer devices entering the market which are fuelling demand for more storage. These devices include high-definition TVs, portable game systems, home media servers, car navigation and entertainment systems, and multi-function cell phones. The positive thing about the region is that in spite of the global issues we expect to see continued growth across the region, though at a slower rate than before. This will be driven by demand from markets like India, China and Asean, and also the overall growth of the consumer market across the region.
In the more developed markets, notebooks are already out-shipping the traditional desktop PCs. This trend will replicate in our country too. Moving into 2009, we expect the notebook market to grow rapidly. This will be driven by the success of the small-form-factor and lower-cost notebook computers, or netbooks. These low-cost yet full-featured devices will open up new markets as the low price point will make them affordable to a wider spectrum of the market.
For the channel community, the challenge of slowing markets is also an opportunity. For instance, we are witnessing an interesting phenomenon in the enterprise market. In spite of a weaker market for IT in general, storage continues to be in great demand, the reason being that while enterprises are deferring new purchase decisions, upgrades are being sought as an interim measure. Our channel partners can look at ways to capitalize on this opportunity.
The channel will also do well to actively look at the home and retail market. There is rising demand for storage solutions among the end-users who use consumer devices. The consumer electronics market across the world is witnessing spiraling growth. In India, the increasing digitization of content is changing customer demand. This can be a major opportunity for our channel partners. There is a tendency among partners to concentrate on the metros and larger cities, yet small towns hold a lot of promise.
Our initiatives
Last year Seagate achieved a milestone by becoming the first disc drive manufacturer to cross one billion drive shipments totally, a number emblematic of the massive amount of digital content being created in the home, hand, office, car and dozens of other markets. The billion hard drives Seagate has delivered equates to approximately 79 million terabytes. Though it took Seagate nearly 29 years to achieve this figure, the explosive growth of storage means that the company will ship its next billion in less than five years. For 2008-09, we expect to ship 300 million hard drives globally, or around 10 hard drives every second.
This year should see higher capacity in enterprise, desktop and mobile drives. Seagate has just started shipping the world’s first 1.5 TB single drive for desktops. We plan to include the retail channel in our ambit of expansion to tap the growing demand for storage solutions in the consumer space. Through our existing distributors and their networks, we may add new retail partners to our channel portfolio to reach out to more end-users. And we will see a major shift in our product line-up with the release of our first solid state drive for enterprises later this year.
Bottomline
All this translates into enhanced opportunity for channel partners. The channel community should look beyond the challenges of the current downtrend at the opportunities represented by retail and home market, the value added solutions segment, and niche verticals.
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