By Anuj Sharma

New Delhi, Mar 17 (IANS): India is the next big market for US-based data storage provider Western Digital Corporation (WDC), which will elevate the country as a stand-alone core region within the company and not club it with a sub-region, a top executive has said.

India will not be a part of APAC (Asia Pacific) and EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) sub-regions but will be a separate region by itself and will report directly to our corporate headquarters (in Irvine, California), Khalid Wani, WDC's Managing Director for India Sales, told IANS in an interview.

"With the new regional status, we believe India will be able to shape its new destiny, create its own go to market strategies similar to APAC and EMEA as a region," he added.

Also, having India as a separate region will allow WDC to fcus in a sharper manner on the way the country's economy is shaping up, and the strong potential for the company to do business here, he explained.

WDC has a robust portfolio of products and solutions that address a wide range of applications in almost all of the world's computing and mobile devices.

In May 2016, the company completed the acquisition of SanDisk Corporation for $19 billion, making it a comprehensive storage solutions provider with global reach and an extensive product and technology platform that includes deep expertise in both rotating magnetic storage and non-volatile memory (NVM).

"With the integration of WDC, SanDisk and HGST, we have become a formidable force when it comes to the storage industry globally and this allows us to offer a much stronger proposition to our customers. We will be best positioned to address the demands for data storage, which is growing exponentially every year," Wani stressed.

Smartphone adoption, internet penetration and the 4G rollout are the top trends that drive the storage business. Nowadays consumers have access to a lot of content and the more content they generate, the more they will need storage devices.

One of the areas that got created from smartphone adoption is "dual drives" as smartphones are limited by memory. Dual drives can directly get connected to your phone and you can back-up your data, he elaborated.

Owing to the increasing demand for high-tech technologies in the video surveillance market, India will witness a boost in the surveillance adaptation rate in years to come and is a growing category for us because it allows us to aggressively position our surveillance business and drives in the market, Wani said.

According to research and consulting firm 6Wresearch, the Indian video surveillance market is projected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of over 13 per cent between 2016 and 2022 and is expected to top $2.4 billion by 2020.

At this point of time the growth trajectory is right for us in India and all the trends that we are looking at are positive. We are in the right place at the right time. This will be an exciting year for us and we have got interesting product launches coming up, not only in the personal cloud space but also in the SSD (solid-state drive) space, Wani said.