We now have a full fledged local sales and marketing team in India so that we can concentrate on the support issues here

India is a prime market for Hitachi GST and James Ho is
looking at strengthening their support structure in order to penetrate
the tier-1 and 2 cities. This will be followed by brand promotional
activities to encourage the channel

What are some of your plans on the anvil?

At this point in time, India continues to be a prime market
for Hitachi GST and the emerging IT market in India. We now have a full
fledged local sales and marketing team in India so that we can
concentrate on the support issues here. We will probably look at
appointing a Country Manager if the need for the same is felt.

In terms of products, we will have more eco-friendly drives
and will continue to ensure that with the new technology our customers
get to save costs. Hard drives will continue to expand as more and more
digital content is being created by the consumers. In addition we will
continue to focus on mobile drive, desktop drive and consumer
electronics products.

Are you looking at expanding your product portfolio?

We have recently launched the Hitachi Deskstar drive which is
a more energy saving hard drive and is the mobile version of internal
hard drives for laptops. In addition, we have also launched the
Travelstar 500 gigabyte hard drive which is the desktop range of
internal hard drives for desktop PCs. We also have a strategic
partnership with Intel where we have launched a new enterprise class
SSD for the enterprise customers to meet their business demands in
terms of reducing space, power and cooling costs.

Is Hitachi GST looking at launching portable external
hard drives in India?

Hitachi may look at the possibility and feasibility of
launching the external hard disk drive in India. We also want to ensure
that our partners get all the required support from us and our
customer's business requirements are met in the best possible ways.

What are the trends in the hard drive industry?

The hard drive industry is expanding at a very healthy pace
with the kind of digital content created and stored by the customers.
The enterprise class customer is looking at products that have high
capacity and high performance. So we believe that these growing trends
will help the hard drive industry in terms of increasing capacity and
cost. In terms of the power saving technology and the overall energy
consumption of the products in all segments we will continue to have
eco-friendly products.

border="0" bordercolor="#111111" cellpadding="5"
cellspacing="0" width="40">
height="215" width="150">James Ho

MD-Asia Pacific, Hitachi Global

Storage Technologies (GST)

How do you view competition from vendors?

We will continue to provide our customers with value
proposition in terms of quality and reliability. At the same time we
have also implemented various programs for partners, which were very
successful in India and we will continue to upgrade these programs this
year. The Hitachi Partner Privileged Program helps them capture market
opportunity across India.

How will Hitachi GST enhance its brand visibility in
India?

India remains one of the prominent markets for us and even as
we continue to support our partners through the HPP program, to
supplement the program we will expand quality and consistent channel
support. We will organize quarterly meeting, training programs, channel
appreciation programs and also have a retailer certification in place
to enhance our brand visibility further.

Pooja Sharma

(poojas@cybermedia.co.in)