The Secret to Success: Prioritize People and Products

When people find out that Toshiba was the fastest growing storage vendor in 2016*, people often ask me how we did it.  There is no single answer to the question, but a lot of the success can be explained by our efforts to focus on people and products.  What do I mean by that?  Let me break it down…

People

In the latter half of 2015 and into 2016, Toshiba re-organized, re-tooled, and expanded our customer support teams, including marketing.  The team had one major objective: to improve the strategic relationship with our customers.  In order to do that we had to change the way we do business to make our customers’ products more competitive. We set out to realign our business practices and supply chain with our customers and prioritize their needs ahead of ours.  In some cases, we had to bring new people into our organization who had the experience and skill set to make this happen.  In other cases, we had to build new connections and cultivate better working relationships with people at our customers that we traditionally hadn’t interacted with.

Products

Certainly some of the gains we saw are due to strong execution of our products.  I’ve heard from more than one customer that Toshiba SSDs are the easiest to qualify, and that goes a long way when it comes to getting products to production.  And once in production, Toshiba has typically shown excellent reliability in the field with a return rate that typically runs well below our warranty specification.  We also focused on enabling differentiated products with our customers through innovative and hard to implement product features.  For instance, in Enterprise we introduced FIPS-certified SSDs to help our customers meet advanced HIPA and government regulations; in Client, we introduced the world’s smallest PCIe® NVMe SSD** with our BG product line to enable smaller, lighter weight, and longer battery-life products, motivating consumers to upgrade their current devices or to enable the creation of new classes of products entirely.  And Toshiba saw significant market share gains in both Enterprise SSDs (based on our very strong SAS product line) and Client SSDs (based on our very strong PCIe product lines) as you can see in the IDC data*:

As a vertically integrated supplier, Toshiba is committed to the solid state drive space with an extremely broad line of products that allows us to address almost every need our customers have regardless of interface, capacity, form factor, endurance, performance, and the like.  I couldn’t be more excited about our future potential based on our thriving customer relationships, our mega-fab Flash production capabilities, our very broad and growing product portfolio and of course our outstanding engineering team development capabilities!

*Fastest growing vendor as measured by revenue, based on IDC Worldwide Solid State Storage Quarterly Update: 4Q16 Summary (Feb 2017 IDC Doc #US41259317) and IDC Worldwide 4Q16 HDD Shipment Results and Four-Quarter Forecast Update (Feb 2017 - Doc #US42306617). 2015 revenue and unit baseline includes separate results from companies merged with non-affiliate third-party companies in 2016.

**Based on Toshiba Survey, February 1, 2017 of NVMe SSDs and our BG Series M.2 1620 Single Package NVMe SSD

PCI Express and PCIe are trademarks or registered trademarks of PCI-SIG.

 

Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of KIOXIA America, Inc.

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