An Interaction with Kingston Technology | ChannelDrive.in
As a technology-oriented organisation, Kingston Technology has always been on the forefront of delivering the best in class products and solutions to its customers – keeping its focus towards delivering next generation-ready storage solutions – the company is taking forward its legacy of innovations and catering to the storage needs of tomorrow.
Vishal Parekh, Marketing Director, Kingston Technology & HyperX India speaks with Zia Askari from ChannelDrive.in about the company’s current focus and its near-term future plans.
What are the key priorities for Kingston today?
Kingston has completed its 30thsuccessful years globally in October. Over the years, we have gathered expertise and a fair understanding of the market forces. We have always believed in growing with our channel partners and our strategies for Kingston revolve mainly around ‘Collective Growth’.
Our priorities are multifold and aim at improving our market position as the number one Lifestyle Technology brand, a position we have held for well over a decade. Our efforts are also towards improving on the industry benchmarks that we set for After Sales service. With the ever changing technology, we also invest energies to educate partners about the trends and help them understand future growth prospects.
Kingston is able to create a great brand name and presence on global scale. How has been the journey for Kingston so far and what can we expect in the future?
Kingston was started out of a small unit and has grown ever since to the magnitude that we do business today in almost all continents. Yes, the journey has been just like any other business with ups and downs but what favoured us was a focus to continuously improve the product, corporate solutions and after sales service, without compromising on quality. We have been ranked as one of the fastest growing brands globally and we are overwhelmed with the same response in India.
Our journey has been rather exciting and we plan to keep it that way with a strong road map. For better performance, looks and functionality, we have recently introduced our first ever NVMe drive with KC1000 SSD, which is one of the fastest yet affordable. There are more updates to expect in this year in terms of newer product capacities and improvements in terms of speed and durability.
How does the company look at the evolving storage needs of the consumer society today? What more can be done to deliver more with great RoI?
At a time when Hard disks were dominating markets globally, Kingston was one of the first brands to invest in SSDs because of our foresight for improvement in productivity and application. The growing demand for newer technologies for data consumption has made ‘Storage’ an evergreen requirement for everyone, be it end users, SMEs, corporates or enterprises. As India is moving towards digitization, Data creation, storage costs and data retention requirements are escalating while business users demand instant access to all data all the time. Meeting the critical demands while delivering a strong ROI for the data storage investments is the need of the hour.
Gaming as a segment is attracting a lot of eyeballs from the computing space. How do you as an organization look at gaming?
HyperX – part of Kingston – is a pretty well-known brand for the full range of gaming PC components and peripherals – headsets to SSD to memory to keyboards to mouse pads, etc. We deal with Indian gaming with a 3-tier approach: The key is to provide good quality gaming gear for gamers to practice, sync with gaming cafés nationwide and run programs with them to build a strong unified ecosystem for the Industry. So, whether they are the enthusiasts or performance gamers, this approach builds a platform to enrich their experience and practice their proficiencies. Also, these tournaments shall bring the best support at national and international platforms that give the Indian gamers a chance to showcase their talent. – ESL, IESC, India Gaming Show, KO Nights, ILG, Gamer Connect, Case Mod series, etc.
What kind of product innovations can we expect from Kingston in the near future?
Kingston is a very channel friendly lifestyle technology brand and has got a strong support from both, the partners and end users. It is the innovation & good quality products at Kingston that provides a better experience to its users. All Kingston products are engineered to bring the latest in technology at the most prudent prices. Keep watching this space as we have some announcements in pipeline.
Indian government is pushing the digital envelope by the help of digital India initiative and also going strong on make in India program – how does Kingston look at these two trends today? Is there any role being played by Kingston in these initiatives today or in near future?
Kingston has been a fervent supporter of India’s digital inclusion agenda over the past many years & we are thrilled to see the progress that is bringing technology and innovation mainstream in India. We encourage this vision of India, as it will be the catalyst towards driving technology-enabled inclusion & transformation at the grassroots level. It shall empower the businesses to improve the bottom lines. However, for that to be productive, there needs to be the back-end analysis, on quality hardware to be used in the servers and systems.
With regards to your operations in India, what kind of growth are you looking at and from where will this growth come from?
We have recently celebrated our 30th successful year globally. Even in India, we almost complete 20 years, which is a very successful run. We have grown the market share brick by brick and we look forward to continue the same good run.
India is a very key market for us, and also one of the fastest growing markets. For the upcoming product lines, we have a focussed strategy and attention among the corporates, enterprises and even the end users here. For the end users, one can except more revisions and upgrades to our existing portfolio of products and solutions.
India is moving towards becoming a hub for e-sports however with limited bandwidth and avenues. Exploring the same, for gamers, we aim to create the robust value system in terms of a complete range of products being made available very shortly. We aim to strengthen the Gaming Ecosystem by working closely with the partners at micro and macro level, that shall focus on ergonomics and personalization to provide innovation that shall enhance player performance and enjoyment. That being said, we also co-organize gamer meets all over the country, building a platform enhancing the gamer’s knowledge & skills.
In the past we have been the sponsors to India’s largest esport tournament – ESL India Premiership – to encourage gamer participation and have sponsored over 20 teams globally. Not only that, we also support budding gaming cafés in India to understand and set up their systems with optimum investments.
