GEC NEWS WIREAs a part of its Beyond Surveillance campaign, Western Digital showcased its latest surveillance solutions at the recently held Intersec 2019. As the surveillance industry moves to higher-resolution cameras and new applications requiring real-time analytics, Western Digital’s full edge-to-core surveillance portfolio shifts focus from ‘seeing’ to safety and insights.
Built around the themes of capture, store and analyze, the Beyond Surveillance campaign focuses on advanced surveillance technologies demonstrating how Western Digital solutions support deep learning and analytics such as facial or object recognition and traffic heat maps.
Enterprise Channels MEA sits down with Khwaja Saifuddin, Senior Sales Director at Western Digital at the show. Excerpts.
As goes the cliché, Data is the new currency. How has Western Digital been able to innovate newer solutions for satiating the demands of the data-driven organizations?
2019 has kicked-off with a bang for WD. We have launched some good products in sync with the market inclination for higher capacity storage and made some strong messaging on digital storage and how we perceive the future of storage at WD. We have launched a wide range of products that include the 4 terabytes external storage from an SSD point of view; the largest capacity micro SD card for security and surveillance camera; the 12 terabytes purple and all the way to 14 terabytes enterprise class drives. With each and every product we are going beyond traditional storage. Our messaging to the market is that – from capturing to storing to analyzing data, the entire journey can happen on a Western Digital Product.
Capture, Store, Analyze – the third point is what matters the most today. How does WD products make the stored data worthwhile?
At Western Digital, our prime motive is to make sure that the data is available when you need it. Today every second or third VMS solutions has an embedded AI component. So, to ensure that everything runs perfectly you need to have a device that makes your data easily available and write the data in a way that it is compatible with each and every device that it is connected with. This is one of the differentiating factors with WD. We do not make a one-size-fits-all product or solution, but solutions that are built upon the compatibility models, scalability and peace of mind that the users have when they are storing their data on a WD device. This is a key component when you have hundreds of cameras writing at the same time. All investments are done keeping in mind that all the data should be available in the same quality and resolution that it should be in.
What is your take on the Surveillance industry and how do you plan to re-route or revisit your market strategies?
The global surveillance industry is growing by 20% YoY from a solution and implementation perspective. We forecast it to be steady in the coming years as well. The market is changing, the channel ecosystem is changing and the entire way of doing business is changing so we cannot remain stagnant. We are very agile on that because of our local presence which is yet another key differentiator that makes WD stand apart. We are not only close to the market place but also the people who are running the market place. We become the change that the market beckons.
