Hitachi drives hard to expand Canadian sales

System builders and resellers have another source for buying Hitachi hard drives for storage arrays and PCs.Synnex Canada has added drives from Hitachi’s Global Storage Technologies (GST) division as the manufacturer tries to increase its small market share here.
Jim Estill, the distributor’s chief executive officer, said that while it already carries hard drives from most leading manufacturers, he is most interested that Hitachi’s lineup includes enterprise-class drives.
“The high-end storage market is fairly hot,” he said. “From a reseller’s perspective, it’s great to get into a market that’s growing at 30 to 40 per cent a year.”
Hitachi already had a U.S. distribution deal with Synnex Canada’s parent, Synnex Corp.
The agreement includes one-inch, 2.5-in. and 3.5-in. drives under the Microdrive, Travelstar, Deskstar, Enduastar and Ultrastar names.
Hitachi now has two major hard drive distributors here. The other is Bell Microproducts.
“Synnex has great customer support capabilities, really understands system builders,” said Barbara Cook, channel development manager for Hitachi GST. “We’re going to rely on it to provide inroads into that community.”
According to Jennifer Ewan, a storage analyst at Evans Research, Hitachi’s sales here lag behind better-known names.
In the first quarter of this year, when 507,000 hard drives were sold, Hitachi had a sizable market share in only one of the three sizes tracked by the market research company.
In the 3.5-in. drive market, Maxtor held a 33 per cent share, followed by Western Digital with 28 per cent and Seagate with 23 per cent. Hitachi was fifth with three per cent.
In the 2.5-in. market, Fujitsu owned 51 per cent of the market, with Hitachi second with 20 per cent and Samsung with 18 per cent.
In the SCSI drive market, Seagate dominated with about 75 per cent of the sales.
Cook acknowledged Hitachi hard drive sales aren’t strong here, but noted the division is only three years old. It has taken time to set up a support infrastructure here, including the creation of return depots in Burnaby, B.C., and Oakville, Ont.
“Now that’s all ready to go we’re going to focus on increasing our brand awareness,” she said.
“We want our channel customers to be storage experts, vertical market experts . . . We like our customers to think big,” she said.
For example, the company works closely with Calgary’s Voodoo Computers Inc., which specializes in leading-edge gaming computers.
“They’re always asking us for something really crazy and outside the box. We really like to work with customers like that.”
Another niche is the video security industry, which needs high-capacity hard drives for storing images.