By Editor
There’s really no limit to our capacity for digital media consumption. The result is that storage vendors such as Seagate are on the spot to deliver better storage technologies and capacities to this insatiable crowd
Seagate in the region had another bumper year in 2014 as the combined demand from surveillance, NAS and SSDs segments helped propel business.
“For the vertical market segments, we are moving from traditional standard desktop and now the hard drives are manufactured with specifications. We are seeing huge growth globally in surveillance especially in the Middle East which is the largest growing market in the EMEA region, mainly driven by regulations,” said Sofocles Socratous, VP of Sales & Marketing EMEA.
It is estimated that thousands of buildings in the UAE are still without surveillance in place while developers are legally obligated to do so. So there are a lot more cameras, systems and hard drives to be installed. In Qatar, the laws are that 120 days of storage of video surveillance have to be stored. It takes 8TB per camera to store all that data so with multiple cameras per location, demand is huge. NAS, Sofocles contends, is going to drive a lot of capacity needs in the near future.
The other bright spot is in NAS HDD especially for SOHO as people look to store much more media-rich content, back it up and share.
Solid State Drives have been gaining momentum in the last couple of years as well. “Seagate was the first to manufacture Solid State Dives (SSDs) and now we are in our third generation. We have broadened our SSD portfolio including desktop SSD with the gaming community really strong adopters of this product. Consumers want the performance but they also crave speed so that’s why the SSD solution is really important for the consumer segment,” Sofocles said.
Surveillance, SSD and NAS account for about 15% of Seagate’s business but by mid-next year, those three segments will account for about 30% of the total business mix. The transition is happening fast as more awareness penetrates the market in terms of understanding the products and understanding how the drives work and how reliable SSD drives are.
Retail is an important part of business for Seagate. According to Lance Ohara – Senior Director Product Line Management – Retail at Seagate, the key areas for retail include business NAS or SMB NAS, consumer NAS or Simple NAS used by consumers at home. The other one is the range of wireless drives from Seagate as well as growing appetite for cloud services via apps. “We see the significance for value added products with retailers and resellers interested in how they can increase the value of hard drives in regard to real use cases,” said Ohara.
The growth of personal cloud solutions has been in parallel with public cloud offerings such as Dropbox. Bandwidth, security among other issues means that majority of us are not ready to save everything on public clouds, observes Ohara. “People want immediacy and security of the personal cloud, but also demand the convenience of the public cloud,” Ohars said. “With our software, we have a dashboard that allows customers to use the cloud application they want, such as Dropbox, which they can connect to their personal cloud at home. Only certain information goes to the public cloud but the majority of the content stays to the personal cloud. So we continue to see the interaction of one or the other and not just one vs the other,” Ohara adds.
The development of Solid State Hybrid Drives (SSHD) has continued to expand significantly. In the Middle East region and the GCC’s channel, Seagate has extended the product portfolio with increased higher adoption rates for notebooks, according to Sofocles. “For notebooks, we had two SKUs we have completed. For the notebook, people wanted 1TB; we have delivered 1TB. Adding the new portfolio for the desktop has really helped us and we are seeing more uptake from our global partners. 10% of all the drives shipped globally are SSHD and we are seeing the gaming market talking more and more about it and adopting it,” said Sofocles.
Like everywhere else in IT, the user experience has become paramount. Seagate recently launched on the NAS business segment the NAS OS4 meant to ensure that how people use the product is efficient and smart, Ohara observes.
No doubt that a lot of the rising demand for storage today is being driven by mobility. “Today people have access to content at any time with the majority of handsets today in the world being smartphones. People are simply creating more content and uploading more media. Put cloud and mobility together, and you get consummerization of IT with more people using their personal devices for work purposes,” observes Sofocles.
“User generated content is going to drive growth in the consumer space,” adds Ohara. “Prices are also coming down. From our perspective, we are giving consumers the ability to archive, upload music, photos, music and the peace of mind of not worrying about what to keep and what to discard.”
The exponential growth in capacity of storage drives to match the equally explosive expansion in content means that the language in the storage industry has shifted. “We used to measure sales by units; today it’s about Petabytes and Exabytes. Just last month we manufactured the first 8TB disc drive. With appetite for HD and FullHD content growing, the demand for bigger and bigger capacities in storage drives can only grow.”
Storage has today become a real value added business. Seagate has led this transition after making some high profile acquisitions in the last few years. “We have made several acquisitions in terms of systems, servers, back-ups, software recovery such as EVault, Xyratex and LaCie, as we move more and more into solutions. These acquisitions have allowed us move up the value chain in terms of business support and software and the intelligence that we are building up,” Sofocles said. .
The LaCie acquisition, Ohara explains, was for the NAS OS. When Seagate started the NAS business, it worked with a lot of ODMs but never owned the OS. The acquisition of LaCie gave the company two main things. First was a software development team in Paris, who are on their fourth generation of their NAS OS. “In NAS, the hardware is the easy part; software is the hard part” Ohara said. The other reason was for the Apple business. LaCie is a partner for Apple and this gives Seagate a dominate share with Apple resellers and stores.
Africa represents another potentially lucrative market for Seagate as the company puts in more resources into the continent. “We have the marketing budgets and with strong support from our main office. We see continued maturity and increased opportunities in Africa with majority of these markets behind other regions in the world. So the opportunity there is massive and we will invest in education and awareness for resellers and partners to continue addressing those markets. We are making sure our partners put the value proposition for their end users to fuel demand.
Seagate, Sofocles explains, already has a leading market position in South Africa, while growing and investing in Kenya where recent regulations are enabling more business with Western Europe. Nigeria and Algeria’s growth is really strong and Seagate has appointed strong partners in these regions to grow the business and provide services in terms of supply chain, returns and RMAs.
The future for Seagate looks bright with no end in sight for our tenacity for media creation and sharing. “We’ll continue to find ways to breakthrough new technology. We are looking at increased adoption of SSHD as well as an expansion of our portfolio in the SATA market for surveillance, HDD and NAS. In the enterprise we’ll continue to see more high capacity, improved technology in disc drives. In surveillance disc drives, we are already on our 7thgeneration of delivering solutions for the specific market segment where drives perform in a certain way to optimize performance,” Sofocles said.
Kinetic represents Seagate’s open storage vision offering a platform of key/value Ethernet drives plus developers tools and APIs for software-defined, object-oriented, scale-out approaches to data centre architecture. This new type of technology in the market will start to see growth as adoption of open stacks grows, Sofocles says.