Tareq Husseini, the Regional Sales Director for Middle East and Africa at Western Digital Corporation, speaks to Review Central about the company’s plans for 2018
Tareq Husseini, the Regional Sales Director for Middle East and Africa at Western Digital Corporation.
Which technology trends worked in the year 2017?
There are continuously many new advancements when it comes to technology, such as Virtual Reality, Everything on-Demand Apps, Machine Learning and Automation (eg. Robotic journalists), and one that Western Digital Corporation has always excelled at is management and security of all kinds of data.
There are massive quantities of collected data that people need access at any moment, if not constantly. Everybody needs storage solutions for their data, from the development of better medical treatments to implementing better marketing campaigns, or merely saving pictures and videos.
Western Digital is relentlessly working on its SanDisk and Western Digital brands to keep producing and creating new products for every storage-need consumer might require. For every storage solution need, Western Digital has its consumers covered with its innovative product portfolio. Whether the need is for home, work data management, or even for a mobile device, all Western Digital and SanDisk products are designed keeping in mind the needs of today’s tech-savvy users.
The industry-leading storage technologies and solutions by Western Digital enable people to create, leverage, experience and preserve data on its latest products such as WD My Cloud Home, SanDisk iXpand Base, WD My Passport SSD, SanDisk 400 GB Micro SD, SanDisk Ultra microSD card with A1, WD Blue SSD, WD Green SSD, WD Purple 10TB Surveillance Hard Disk Drive, 12TB WD Gold Hard Drive, and more.
What were your company’s major achievements in 2017?
Western Digital continues to deliver and showcase its impressive portfolio of hi-tech storage solutions, and as always it is on the forefront of innovation and technology advancement. Other than launching their many new products, Western Digital participated in the region’s most popular technology and gaming exhibitions and conferences to provide consumers an easy access to their latest products portfolio.
Which products and solutions were launched / updated by your company this year?
As mentioned above, our main highlights of 2017 revolved around the exciting launches of the WD My Cloud Home, the SanDisk iXpand Base, SanDisk 400 GB, and WD Gold Drive
Our recently launched WD My Cloud Home is a personal cloud storage solution that empowers consumers to take control of their often-scattered digital content. With the My Cloud Home solution, consumers can easily aggregate all of their photos, videos and files from their smart phones, computers, USB storage, cloud and social media accounts in one central place. Setting up My Cloud Home is easy and has enabled safety features such as App Passcode/Touch ID.
The company also unveiled SanDisk iXpand Base, which is especially made for iPhone and automatically backs up photos, videos and contacts while the phone is kept on charging mode. Designed for everyday use with a soft rubber top, a sturdy base, and a wrap-around groove to keep your Apple Lightning cable tidy. The iXpand Base is also engineered for convenience, delivering fast charging with 15W of power and a companion app for backing up and restoring your content to your iPhone.
Western Digital also launched SanDisk 400 GB, the world’s highest-capacity microSD card for use in mobile devices. Two years after introducing its record-breaking 200GB SanDisk Ultra microSDXC card, Western Digital has doubled the capacity within the same tiny form factor.
Keeping up with the demands of today’s mobile-centric lifestyle, the new SanDisk microSD card provides consumers with the freedom to capture, save and share photos, videos and apps, and enjoy offline content – all without worrying about storage limitations.
The WD Gold Drive is designed for heavy-workload, high-vibration server environments, and address demanding Big Data workloads, so it is most appropriate for Big Data workloads. The new high-capacity hard drives provide for increased storage density in a range of enterprise and cloud storage applications. Whether data comes in the form of confidential consumer data, healthcare records or business intelligence, WD Gold hard drives provide a no-compromise storage solution that modern day IT managers’ need.
What do you expect from 2018?
The Middle East is and will continue to be one of the crucial markets for Western Digital. Within the region specifically, we focus on the UAE, KSA and Egypt. We also continue to focus on growing our presence in Africa, specifically North and South, and are currently heavily expanding into the Central African regions, as we are looking forward to grow more and attract new consumers and businesses.
What sort of technologies, products and solutions will you focus on, in 2018?
Western Digital is constantly looking to offer newer and better technologies to its customers. Mobile storage solutions continues to be a core focus for the company as more and more people of all ages and walks of life are using their mobiles to take pictures and videos, editing their content to create more content, and sharing their material on their social media platforms, which all takes up an abundant amount of space, and issues a need for storage solutions.
Moreover, as the Security and Surveillance industry continues to grow, Western Digital has focused on making the trustworthy WD Purple Hard Drive as it is engineered for 24×7 reliable operation in HD security systems with up to five hard drives and up to 32 camera. The 10TB Surveillance Hard Disk Drive offers exclusive AllFrame technology to bring you premium reliability and peace-of-mind when installing your home or small to medium business security system.
It is designed to replace standard desktop drives that were not designed for the harsh 24/7 always-on, high-definition surveillance environment, and for high temperature, always-on, surveillance security systems to ensure reliability and quality video play back when you need it most; all with less power consumption.
Western Digital continues to expand its extraordinary portfolio to cater to their consumers’ different needs and wants, and to make sure consumers find their need-appropriate storage solution. There is no one size that fits all. There are many more exciting capacity breakthrough products to come for Western Digital; make sure you tune in to find out!
Do you see a big growth in the gaming market?
Western Digital offers path-breaking products that provide reliable, responsive and high-performance storage for gamers. By offering solid-state technology, we enhance our customers’ storage experience.
We understand that the need for storage is continuously growing and requiring more space than ever before from gamer, hence our products are designed to satisfy the needs of gamers.
We have a gaming only product that is exclusive to PlayStation 4: My Passport portable game drive. With the My Passport portable game drive, you can quickly and easily expand the capacity on your PS4 console by up to 4TB to conquer boundless new worlds. Expand your PS4 gaming experience by adding up to 4TB of capacity to your PS4 console and get enough room for as many as 100 PS4 HD games or 40 PS4 Pro 4K games, load games to My Passport and play anywhere without having to reinstall with a very fast and easy setup.
Some other products that are ideal for every gamers are: WD My Passport SSD, WD Blue SSD, SanDisk External SSDs, and SanDisk Extreme microSD card with A1.
WD My Passport SSD is portable storage with blazing-fast transfers. Password protection with hardware encryption helps keep your content secure. Easy to use, it is shock-resistant, compact storage in a cool, durable design.
It is the fastest My Passport drive to date with speeds up to 515MB/s using the USB Type-C port to rapidly transfer data. Its speed gives great performance to help run virtual machines on your computer.
Ready for your high performance computing needs, a WD Blue SSD offers optimized storage with blazing speed and leading-edge reliability. WD Blue SATA SSDs, available in 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB capacities, deliver fast system boot times and less load time with read speeds up to 545MB/s and write speeds up to 525MB/s, in addition to an endurance rating of up to 400TB and a 1.75 million hour mean time to failure ensure a WD Blue SSD, compatible with a wide range of desktop and laptop computers, can help guard your data for years to come.
The WD Black PCIe SSD is a performance PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe-based SSD that delivers more than three times the sequential read speeds of current SATA SSDs. The 256GB and 512GB capacities make it ideal as a boot drive when paired with a high-capacity hard drive, or as primary storage when building a future-ready PC. Consumers who are using new the WD Black PCIe SSD to boot up, load read-intensive games or applications, or shut down a system may realize a performance improvement of more than 10 seconds when compared to SATA SSDs.
