Our goal is to enable India market to maximise the potential of data: Jaganathan Chelliah

In conversation with Adgully, Jaganathan Chelliah, Senior Director, Marketing, India, Middle East, and TIA, Western Digital, deep-dives into the company’s vision for the India market and highlights the innovative marketing strategy adopted to reach to varied audience groups. He also highlights how an ingredient brand like Western Digital has successfully landed campaigns that highlight the significance of data storage in the today’s technological era. 

How do you see your association with Western Digital? How have you taken the brand from where it was when you had joined to where it is today?

I have spent about two decades and a half in the technology industry. I started my career at Intel, spent a few years at Texas Instruments and then at SanDisk, when it got acquired by Western Digital. I was heading marketing for SanDisk and then, I started heading the marketing function for the combined entity. Today, I am responsible for India, Middle East and Africa region, which includes Turkey and Israel.

My association with Western Digital started in 2017 post the acquisition of SanDisk. Western Digital follows a house of brands strategy where depending on the customer segment and their storage needs, we have a specific brand. For consumers we have SanDisk and WD brands to solve their personal storage needs, for creators we have SanDisk Professional, there is WD_Black for Gamers , WD Purple for CCTV solutions and Ultrastar for Enterprise customers. Currently, our brands are one of the market leaders each of the market segments they represent.

What is your focus on the data storage industry in India like, especially in the post pandemic period? What is the size of India’s data storage industry?

If you look at the data storage market in India, it has been on a fairly high speed growth mode for the past 6-7 years, ever since smartphones evolved into a multi-functional device. That has actually aided in our growth. With the launch of more and more feature-rich phones, people are using mobile phones to create more content – be it stories, photos and videos. The more people create, the more is the need to store that content. Thus, the growth of smartphones has actually aided in the growth rate of our storage solution products.

With the digital transition and increasing need for data and data storage solutions, what dynamic scope does the Indian market offer Western Digital? What is your vision for the India market in the next five to six years?

You have to look at this digital transformation from three different angles. One is the push from the government to what the enterprise ecosystem is doing and then what’s happening on the consumer side. Clearly if you look at it today, the governance models and the community engagement model are played on a digital platform today. Today, your identity is on digital. With Digital Locker, you don’t need to carry papers. So, that is a big push that has happened from a governance perspective to actually drive digital transformation in our society.

Secondly, our enterprises that began small, have today embraced digital transformation using the cloud based solutions to gain access to the latest technologies. As a result, their ability to use the latest technologies for driving strong productivity growth has increased, which, in turn, is actually great enabling them to create quality outcomes.

Lastly, the consumer today has access to premium and feature-rich smartphones, which have become primary devices for managing their personal entertainment needs and professional engagement.

All these have led to the need to have a very strong data strategy to manage all that information.

This is where an organisation like Western Digital comes in. Our goal is to enable the India market to maximize the potential of the data that is available to ensure that they are able to harness the value of this data and have analytics, and also use it at the appropriate levels to solve either community or business or personal requirements. We see a very strong need for our products as a whole in the next three to five years. And we are also fairly well positioned to provide everything that the market needs, because we have a complete spectrum of portfolio that kind of addresses every storage need out there in the market.

How are you strategising to meet the growing demand for data storage solutions? How are enterprise customers and content creators driving growth for you the new normal?

One of the most important requirements for any enterprise customer is to address the total cost of ownership. They should be able to get maximum ROI for the investment that they are making. The need for a customer is to be able to store all his data in a safe and effective manner at the lowest possible cost. Our endeavour here is to bring in the highest possible storage that consumers can actually use now. Today, we have a 22 terabyte hard drive, which is one of the highest capacities that you will see out there in the marketplace, for enterprise consumers to use.

The content creators’ needs are very unique. They go through a specific workflow when it comes to creating their content – they capture their content, then transfer it from their phone to a device, then take that to their edit table for editing, creating their video and then publishing it. Currently, they are archiving their work across all these four stages, where they encounter specific challenges. It could be the harsh conditions where they are doing the shoot, or while transferring, say, 100 gigabytes of data quickly, or being able to seamlessly edit the content or the requirement for a large storage space for the back-up data. SanDisk’s professional portfolio has a storage solution to address each and every need across this workflow for content creators. We look at the content creator community closely, and we constantly innovate and bring in updated solutions and understand their professional portfolio to solve their needs.