Western Digital, a computer hard disk drive manufacturer and data storage company, is looking at leveraging Indian talent to enhance its data analytics capabilities globally. While the US-headquartered firm already has 2,700 employees in India, mostly for research and development, it is planning to expand its strength by hiring more people with data analytics skills, said Steve Phillpott, chief information officer of Western Digital.

He said, “India is probably one of the bigger and growing sites, as compared to other locations globally. We have a massive footprint here, and our India centre works on research areas like data analytics, robotic process automation and engineering services.”

Globally, Western Digital employs around 15,000 engineers to drive innovation in its product and services sides of businesses.

After the acquisition of Hitachi’s storage unit HGST in 2015 and flash memory products manufacturer SanDisk in 2016, Western Digital had gone through a lot of transition before integrating such large companies with itself. Currently, the company sees a lot of opportunity in data storage space, owing to the implementation of data localisation laws in various countries.

“India is passing these new norms on data privacy and data security. Europe has done it through GDPR. In the US, individual states are also trying to do so. So, I think data needs to be maintained in a localised or nationalised format to adhere to the privacy and residency norms,” Phillpott said, adding that these offer a huge opportunity for companies like Western Digital.

Western Digital has manufacturing sites spread across the globe, including the US, China, The Philippines, Thailand, etc.