Hard drive market is getting exciting

Traditionally, the hard disk drive market has never been considered very

glamorous or even remotely exciting. This perception is mainly due to two

reasons. Firstly, HDD is something which nobody sees as it goes inside the

machine. Secondly, HDD vendors have also on their part refrained from creating

any hype. This has resulted in hard drives being mostly on the periphery all

these years. However, all that should now be a matter of past. Things are

changing and have changed quiet rapidly in the last couple of months-primarily

due to manpower changes.

It started with Samsung, which saw a new person at the helm. Then Maxtor set

up its office in India with Yogesh Kamat being moved from Singapore. After that,

Sharad Khurana took over as the Country head of Seagate, consequent to the

departure of Sharad Srivastava to Singapore. And finally, Srivastava in turn

joined Western Digital as Sales Director for India and South Asia. All these

movements happened within a span of four months. And between these four-Samsung,

Maxtor, Seagate and Western Digital-they practically control the entire hard

drive market.

As a result, for a change these vendors have been getting wide media

coverage, which was not there all these years. Whatever media coverage was there

was mainly in the channel publications, not even in the traditional IT journals.

Which itself is sad, as hard drive is the nerve center of a machine without

which a PC is useless, unless one uses it as a thin client.

Then consider the fact that the PC market this year would be almost five

million strong. Add another 20 percent to that, which constitutes the

replacement market for HDDs, and you come to a figure of six million. Now, this

number is pretty huge by any standards. In addition, this huge market has

basically four major players-as mentioned above-which in itself is quiet

strange.

Considering the market size and the relatively low number of players, the

media coverage has been totally inadequate. Hopefully, this would change now as

all these four players are locked in intense battle to capture a large slice of

the Indian market. Till date, the Indian market has been basically a two horse

race-between Samsung and Seagate-with the other two not very significant

players, which was largely due to the fact that they didn't have a strong

enough presence here. However, now that Maxtor and Western Digital have got

their acts together, things will become much more interesting. Which in turn

should lead to some exciting times ahead.