GitexInterviewsStorage

We Help Complete the Surveillance Solutions Journey, Says WD

Khwaja Saifuddin, the Senior Sales Director at Western Digital speaks to Arabian Reseller about the company’s Beyond Surveillance initiative and the importance of surveillance solutions

Tell us about your new product announcements in the past couple of months.
The biggest announcement is going to be around our partners on how we have completed their journey in terms of surveillance solutions. Today, on the IP cameras, every device comes with a microSD slot, where in case of a redundancy, as a second backup you have a slot for an SD card. So we have announced our new “Beyond Surveillance” initiative, where we take these surveillance solutions beyond the purple purview.

So it starts from wearable cameras, drones, intelligent access systems and 4k cameras where you have an SD-card solution going into your camera, branded as purple under Western Digital. So to capture you have the purple SD cards, to save we have the Purple hard drives and to analyze you have the enterprise-grade Ultrastar range.

How does WD complete the journey in terms of capturing, saving and analysing data?
So we have a complete range of products under three brands, namely Sandisk, WD and GTech. So to capture we have the flash products and SSDs from Sandisk. To save, we have the personal cloud and hard drive solutions from WD. And for analyzing the data, we have the GTech range of top notch products. So no matter where your journey begins, be it surveillance, video footage creation, and so on, we offer an environment for the data that is created to thrive.

What sort of audience is the purple range of SD cards from WD focused on?
These purple SD cards are focused on any user who uses an IP camera or a surveillance camera that comes with an SD slot. We are restarting the journey of education which we did when we launched the purple range of hard drive. People said, “But we have a security guard, we have fencing, we have locks. Why do I need a separate surveillance solution?”.

And we had to teach them that things do happen and accidents happen. So we have many use cases which will be shared with our partners and customers to better understand the value proposition of our products and solutions. We have had cases where during a break-in, the first thing the robbers stole was the DVR thinking this is where the data was residing. What they failed to realize was that the camera had a WD SD card and that was capturing footage all this while.

Tell us about the uptake of GTech products.
We had a major success at GITEX Shopper, where we put the GTech products in front of the consumer and the uptake from the event was brilliant. Our GDrive is a portable hard drive that consumes very less footprint, it is rugged, shockproof, waterproof, fits into your pocket and goes up to 2TB of storage capacity. And it gives you the benefits of Type-C as well.

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Chris Fernando

Chris N. Fernando is an experienced media professional with over two decades of journalistic experience. He is the Editor of Arabian Reseller magazine, the authoritative guide to the regional IT industry. Follow him on Twitter (@chris508) and Instagram (@chris2508).

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