We will be introducing new solutions and technology, especially storage for SMBs and large enterprises.
Core strength as a leader
The very essence of leadership is that your vision translates to an exciting future for the people around you and a character which inspires confidence. Effective leadership is about going out of your way to boost the self-esteem of your personnel. Hierarchy does not make leaders; instead accountability credibility, ability and influence go a long way in determining her or his effectiveness. A leader needs to make constant efforts to prove one’s skills and ensuring a non-complacent attitude. The thought of learning and growing each day motivates me and helps me start my day on a positive note.
Distinctive Decision Making
The opportunity to travel widely helped me understand the subtleties of conducting business in different regions—what works where, what doesn’t, the importance of building local relationships, and most importantly what makes every market unique and every customer special. While working with WD, I was able to introduce some key initiatives at WD for Indian market, the most recent is the myWD Certified Surveillance Storage Provider Program which is designed to provide comprehensive benefits for the security and surveillance channel network. Also, other programs such as WD ki Pathshala (channel education program), WD Partner League (regional channel cricket league) followed by WD Master Blaster (unconventional approach to train the channel partners) including others have evolved into valuable properties. Such stakeholder engagement programmes have been proven successful and helpful in increasing our outreach in India. These programs use driver-based approach (data drivers along with shift patterns) in planning processes which helps with streamlined and linked planning processes. Companies able to remain flexible and make quick decisions are more likely to succeed in today’s fast-paced, volatile environment.
Channel Vision for 2016
We are looking forward to an exciting 2016 where we’ll be introducing new solutions and technology, especially storage for SMBs and large enterprises. We would also like to be a part of the govt’s Digital India initiative and the vision of developing 100 smart cities in future. To fulfil that partners are a key part of our strategy and contributors to our sales. We spend considerable time with our local channel partners in educating, training and addressing their concerns as they help us understand the trends and demands of different regions and are a vital link between us and the users. We ensure that we maintain strong bonds with our current channel partners, as well as continuously reach out to new ones so as to increase our presence across the country, not just in tier I and tier II cities but also in tier III cities. In order to establish and build relationships with the channel and partner community, we organize a variety of programs and offers. One such program is our new offering myWD Certified Surveillance Storage Provider Program which is designed to provide comprehensive benefits for the security and surveillance channel network. The myWD Certified Surveillance Storage Provider Program is a tailor-made initiative that aims to offer training, sales support, value added benefits and incentives to security and surveillance system integrators, installers, solution and service providers to help them enhance their business opportunities and profitability. We enhance the knowledge base of the resellers, making them more involved and showing them various paths to diversify in surveillance and security market opportunities if they find the traditional PC markets stagnant, thereby increasing the portfolio. Another program is ‘WD Eureka’ is our way of reaching out to and updating our channel partners on our solutions in a fun-filled manner, right at their doorstep. ‘WD Ki Paathshaala’ consists of regular training sessions with our channel partners to apprise them of our offerings.
‘WDpedia’, an initiative for the relatively new channel partners, helps WD build and grow relationships with them in the upcountry markets and provide them with direct access to our company. The myWD Partner Program is specifically created to help our resellers, solution providers and system integrators grow their business. The program offers a comprehensive line up of benefits including direct incentives, exciting member-only promotions, exclusive access to a rich set of marketing tools and more, while maintaining established purchasing and fulfilment relationships with our distributors. Another important program is WD University, a valuable resource that makes it easier for the partners to sell WD products by staying up-to-date with product information to build the knowledge and expertise.
As far as strategy is concerned, considering the increase in mobile phone user-base and handheld devices, the demand to create, save, and access huge amount of data is at all time high. And because of that, personal cloud category of NAS-enabled storage is likely to see high growth and adoption in the future. Therefore, we are extremely bullish on the technological shift as our storage solutions are completely customized to cater to this segment. Also, gaming and animation vertical is set for an exponential growth especially in South India because of existing IT infrastructure, it will be a major growth market for us. Furthermore, initiatives like Digital India and Smart Cities have brought to the forefront an array of concerns, the primary being the need for a robust security infrastructure. Therefore, the need for highly specialized surveillance drives will be extremely important to ensure that the data captured can be stored, analyzed and monitored easily. Our highly optimized security and surveillance data storage solutions address this need and hence are apt for our growth in this vertical.
