Robert Soderbery0:22
Well, you know, I first started looking at Western Digital. I had to go back and actually do some research. And what I found was, number one, the company has just this amazing kind of throw weight in the industry in terms of the number of applications, the number of technologies, the number of places in the world that Western Digital technology is in use and at play.
I think the thing that's most exciting to me is that virtually every innovation and technology today is powered by Flash. Whether it's the connected car or the VR headset or the public cloud. You want to be in the place that's behind the mega trend. And I think that's where the Western Digital Flash business really is today.
Well, yeah, I mean, it's really an interesting story. I mean, these were completely independent markets, right? You would never put a hard drive in a mobile phone. You would have never put flash inside your PC. All of a sudden it became possible to do anything with these technologies. And so that just led to this real confusion in the marketplace. And there were clear spaces of the hard drive market that really were better served by Flash. And I think that caused people to not quite understand what was going to happen. And so that was this period of confusion and uncertainty.
Information data is exploding. And really the only practical place to put that information is on hard drives. You've got a 5 or 6x price performance advantage there. That's a huge gap. You're not going to close that gap for many, many, many years. And so coming out of that sort of period of confusion, it's now become clear. If you look, if you need to store information for a long time, hard drive is the right place to do that. If you're looking to build a new kind of consumer device, if you have performance, if it's about new capabilities you're going to enable, that's going to be Flash. And now these markets are very separate, very distinct. And I never think about conflict with the hard drive business or overlap.
Could be businesses, could be enterprises, a wide variety of other third parties. And so as we think about innovation, innovation is about that entire value chain. I need to understand the entire stream for myself all the way out to the end user. And so collaboration is core to that. We have to partner with our customers. We have to partner with the technology companies that we sell to, to really understand how we can build solutions that fit the application better. And I think people just don't realize how much goes into that. It's a tremendous amount of work and a tremendous amount of technology that really goes into building fit-for-purpose solutions for each of these markets. I mean, your car is very different than your phone and that's very different than the public cloud.
I look at today's announcements as a proof point in the Western Digital strategy. Our strategy is very simple. We have the broadest perspective. We see the big picture. We're 40% of the bits in the world. We're 35% of NAND production. We serve all the markets, we serve all the verticals. And in fact, today we're announcing new capabilities in each of the four markets that we play. In consumer solutions, SanDisk Professional, new brand new product strategy in the client world. Now we're here with WD_BLACK and extending our WD_BLACK franchise. In the data center, Percona and our partnership with Percona in pursuit of MySQL and ZNS integration.
And our strategy of really impacting the end markets. It's not just about NAND. It's about how we deliver products and enable these segments and these customers.
