Nathan Su, Flash Memory Product Manager (APAC Region), Kingston Technology, in an interview with Kapil Mudholkar elaborates on the company's foray into SSD market, and its role. Excerpts...

How do you see the future of Kingston products in Indian SSD market?

Solid State Storage remains the most exciting and fastest changing part of the storage market. A number of completely different technologies, architectures, interfaces and form factors all clamoring for attention - and saying "Look at me! I'm best."

Kingston products have always stood out, be it our DRAM or flash drives and cards, for innovative design, premium build quality, unique features, high reliability and superior performance. Our initial SSD offerings, although late entrants into an already crowded marketplace, are already setting the pace with market leading performance benchmarks, and are receiving rave reviews from test labs across the world.

Kingston is a market leader, by a significant margin, in every product category that we operate in. Naturally we are focused on repeating this success with our SSD product line as well.

Are you targeting any particular segment with your products?

At present, we are offering only three new drives, SSDNow E Series and the SSDnow M Series. The E series is a 32GB drive based on the fast single level cell (SLC) technology aimed at the enterprise market, where fast IOPS (Input/Output Per Second) is required. The E Series delivers read speeds of 250MB/sec and write speeds of 170MB/sec.

The M series drive is based on the cheaper MLC tech and is aimed at high end notebook and PC enthusiasts. The V Series is aimed at entry level users.

What made you foray in this business?

We did a lot of research before entering the market. SSDs have been around for over 18 months now, but it's taken this long for us to be comfortable with them. Have spent years perfecting our DRAM and flash storage product offerings, it was naturally time to look at extending our strong expertise in this specialized area into newer product category. And that is how we came into SSDs.

Do you think your entry will make SSD market more open?

We hope so. Our initial offerings are well positioned and are already setting new benchmarks in product performance. To say the least, Kingston's entry will help consumers experience higher product build quality and solution performance.

What are your India plans for SSD products?

Presently, we are in a channel and consumer education mode and will seek to position target customer mindsets to align with our present product offerings. As market acceptance widens, we will correspondingly upscale our plans for this product category in the market.

How do you differentiate yourself from competition?

For us, positioning is everything. The 32GB drive is aimed at the data center, for financial transactions, database servers for e-commerce. We think of it as part of a caching array, delivering incredibly fast access to the most important data and being able to make transactions with that data 10 of thousands of times a second.

Current competitor drives on the market are really version 1.0. And while the market is not yet mature, it is maturing. A lot of that is down to the controller; if you have a cheap controller you have a rubbish product.

Have you received market response for your products?

Since its launch at CES early this year, our SSD offerings have received very encouraging reviews from analysts and customers alike. We are currently satisfied with market feedback for our product positioning and resultant sales volumes. We believe sometime through 2009 and mid 2010 volume sales will increase noticeably.

What do you think of overall SSD market in India?

At present it is a nascent market and given the price sensitivity of Indian consumers, it will be a while before SSDs become a mainstream product category. Initially we expect niche enterprise applications, where fast IOPS (Input/Output Per Second) is required, will drive SSD demand. Mainstream acceptance and volume sales will follow through with lower price bands and better understanding of SSD applications.

What role would you like to play in this product segment?

We would like to take a leading role in educating target consumers on SSD benefits and applications.

Any channel plans for SSD product.

We are a channel driven company and will promote SSD markets through the existing channel itself.

Please elaborate on challenges and restrictions you face or likely to face in this market?

Economic recession, lower awareness of SSD applications and benefits, higher price bands for initial SSD offerings are all factors that are likely to inhibit growth of SSD market in India. However, this is at worst a transitional period and pricing will drop through 2009 along with further technical advancements in the technology.