''We see greater opportunities as the data continues to grow''

During his recent visit to India, Phil Brace, President, Cloud Systems and Electronic Solutions at Seagate Technology spoke to Thomas George, CIOL on how the company bets on the digital data growth and explains the company's plans to cater to the new-age flash and cloud storage products demand across data-centric organizations. Here's the excerpt:

People who view Seagate as a hard drive manufacturer for the client, often question about the future of the hard drive industry. It is true that the market landscape has been changing rapidly. But the hard drive is not just about the PC market.

The hard drive market is seeing greater opportunities as the data continues to grow, be it from smartphones, laptops, tablets, surveillance, cloud, etc.

For Seagate, the traditional PC client market now represents less than 35% of Seagate’s total global revenue, unlike six years back, when the traditional PC client market represented 85% of Seagate’s total global revenue. While 35% of Seagate’s business globally is around PCs, the rest is around, cloud, NAS, Surveillance, etc.

Seagate boasts the broadest range of storage solutions, including hard drives, hybrid drives, systems, services and consumer devices, serving the digital data growth at every segment. No matter where the data is created, it calls for more storage and it means more opportunities for Seagate. Seagate’s solid leadership is proven by the fact that 40% of world’s data is stored on Seagate products.

It is clear that the locality of data is changing, and the India market is also experiencing such change. The ongoing initiatives by the Indian government like Digital India and Smart Cities will drive this, triggering tremendous data growth. These focus areas will also continue to drive the adoption of cloud/hybrid solutions.

Exabytes of data is growing at 30-35% per year, but not the IT budget. Customers are required to make their move to adopt new technologies, such as cloud, to tackle these challenges. This is why Seagate is developing new storage solutions that answer to the demand and the centres at Pune and Bangalore are a part of this effort.

The centres have around 660 people and the teams at these centres are working with Seagate’s other centres of excellence(CoE) around the world in developing Seagate’s flash controllers, flash Solid State Drives, PCIe accelerators and cloud solutions.

In Bangalore, the team is focused on flash solutions for the SAN and DAS markets, Enterprise flash solutions in PCIe and Solid State Drive form factors, and drive system development, software defined storage products.

In Pune, the team primarily focuses on the controller technology for flash products and Cloud Systems.

We have a strong confidence in a vast pool of talent and expertise and the presence in Bangalore and Pune will help us to be close to manufacturers, suppliers, partners and customers whom we can work alongside with.

The innovations we develop collaboratively at Seagate’s global CoEs are being used today as the critical data infrastructure that supports the growth and development of smart cities. We will continue to work with governments, universities, other technology partners and other leaders in the implementation and evolution of the smart city concept.

Seagate is optimistic about the future in India as data will only continue to grow and we believe that hybrid cloud would catch up very soon in India on a large scale. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for storage. Hard disk drives, solid state hard drives, hybrid drives, systems, services and consumer devices- each will play crucial roles in the storage ecosystem. Our goal and strategy is to provide the broadest range of options for our customers based on their computing needs.