By Editor
Recent breakthroughs in storage and how these can be leveraged moving forward will be key talking points at the forum
Seagate is hosting stakeholders from across the region’s IT channel this week at its annual “Seagate Middle East Partner Conference” taking place at the Grand Hyatt Dubai. The event comes at a time when the Middle East’s IT storage industry is evolving at a rapid pace over the past few years.
During this year’s forum participants are expected to focus on how greater mobility, requirements for deeper data analytics, and the shift towards open-source technology will propel the IT sector’s growth over the next 12 months. Through a series of exclusive solution demos and partner workshops, organizers will also preview how businesses in the Middle East can better leverage recent breakthroughs in storage technology to establish greener and more reliable IT systems.
The industry is changing fast and Seagate is keen to change with the environment and using these events to help partners with their own transition, says Sofocles Socratous, Senior Director for EMEA channel and Emerging Markets at Seagate. “Traditionally many of our drives were about the PC and laptop. But today the drives are not just a disc drive; it can do so much more provided you chose the correct drive for the correct application. So this event is more of an education to the reseller community,” Socratous added.
Alongside this year’s program, and other senior managers from Seagate’s EMEA division will outline the latest additions to the company’s Seagate Partner Program (SPP), opening up more channels through which distributors can benefit from collaborative technical trainings, access to global sales support, and more compelling incentive schemes.
“We are working with many partners as data increases dramatically with the critical issue today being Big Data. It’s about how you retrieve the data, the analytics around the data and how you can make better decisions moving forward,” said Socratous.
Within the Middle East, Seagate has recently placed increased emphasis on the roll out of a new class of video surveillance, SSHD, NAS, enterprise and cloud technologies. This has included Seagate’s latest Enterprise Turbo SSHD, released as the world’s fastest hard drive, as well as a new network-attached storage HDD line-up and two new enterprise HDD offerings.
“The SSHD hybrid drive in particular has kind of a niche product, but we have found that demand is increasing dramatically due to the fact that we have widened the product portfolio. Now we have introduced desktop drives because the desktop is where the market is bigger and adoption a lot quicker,” explained Socratous.
Seagate’s advancements in the hybrid disk market and flash technology in particular has been bolstered through tie ups with the likes of Virident Systems last year; a strategic agreement seeing the companies jointly deliver solutions for the growing enterprise flash-storage market. Over the past year Seagate and IBM have also collaborated on an enterprise SSHD prototype, bench-testing the unit in their labs with a view to integrate it into IBM System x servers.