Ahead of the launch of WD’s much-awaited Purple drives meant for surveillance systems and high-performance devices, Channel Post exclusively spoke to Khwaja Saifuddin, Senior Sales Director India, Middle East, Africa and Turkey at WD to get a low-down on what the drives are all about and what channel and marketing strategies the company has up its sleeve
What sort of market is present for surveillance and security systems for home and SMB, in the Middle East?
The appetite for home and small business surveillance systems presents the regional IT channel with a massive opportunity for growth. An increasing number of surveillance systems are sold without storage, and the steadily increasing appetite for these systems presents channel players with a huge opportunity to address storage needs by offering purpose built surveillance hard drives such as WD Purple.
In this market end customers buy off-the-shelf systems to install in their homes and small offices or even to take them back home.
How are WD Purple drives different than similar products on the market? What is the USP of the product?
WD Purple drives are designed for mainstream surveillance applications where up to eight drives and 32 HD cameras can be used. It is a dedicated surveillance drive that is designed for 24/7 reliability, broad surveillance system compatibility and boast technologies such as AllFrame and IntelliPower.
AllFrame technology improves playback performance and works with ATA streaming to reduce errors and frame loss, which is vital when reviewing surveillance footage. Equally important is IntelliPower, which lowers drive power consumption and thus heat output, which ultimately contributes towards long term reliability.
What sort of product and marketing strategies have you built around the Purple drives?
Purple is the colour of home and small office surveillance. It’s really as simple as that. WD doesn’t believe in a one size fits all approach but rather is invested in offering a portfolio of class-leading, purpose built products that address the unique needs of specific customers.
With our newly launched Purple drives, we offer the best surveillance hard drive for homes and small office environments. Given the target user base, the Purple drives join our Blue, Green, Black and Red drives under the power of choice product umbrella.
Here, a customer and our partners in the channel need only remember that WD Blue is for mainstream computing, WD Green is for eco-computing, WD Black is for performance, WD Red is for 1-to-5 bay SOHO NAS systems and, last but not least, that Purple is for home and small office surveillance. In short, our colours give the end customer the power of choice.
What sort of channel strategies do you have in mind for VARs and system integrators?
WD works very closely with all of its partners on an on-going basis, whether they are distributors, VARs, system integrators or even resellers who are focused exclusively on the security and surveillance vertical.
We have a strong breadth of partners and firmly believe that training partners on the latest products and technologies is vital to success – with a variety of purpose built products that are quite technical, training is a critical part of our channel strategy.
Beyond training, partners are also enrolled in programs such as myWD where they can source marketing collateral, become apprised of future products and can take advantage of incentives on our whole range of products.
