Earlier this year, Seagate sponsored an IDC whitepaper, Data Age 2025 which predicts that data creation will swell to a total of 163 zettabytes (ZB) by 2025. This study indicates that the decade centered around the conversion of analog data to digital is being replaced by an era focused on the value of data; creating, utilizing, and managing ‘life critical’ data necessary for the smooth running of daily life for consumers, governments and businesses alike. With this report, Seagate advised global business leaders and entrepreneurs to sharpen focus on data critical to the success of global business impact. Mr. Bob Yang, Regional Vice President for APAC sales at Seagate, speaking exclusively with DT shared his upcoming channel plans and overall opinion on growth in Indian market.
DT: What have been the crucial milestones of your company during year 2017?
Mr. Bob Yang: 2017 was also a great year for Seagate in reinforcing its strength in cloud and big data analysis markets, announcing strategic cooperation agreements with Baidu and Tencent Technology. Seagate and Baidu’s pact renews an existing agreement between the two firms signed in September 2014, which further strengthens their cooperation for big data analysis and advanced storage system development and implementation. With its agreement with Tencent, Seagate and Tencent will carry out an all-round and in-depth cooperation covering products and technology, and will work together to drive market development activities.
The year has also been good in terms of new products that were launched such as 12TB IronWolf and BarraCuda Pro drives and SkyHawk AI hard disk drive. As mentioned, we are experiencing a massive increase in the volume of data created, a total of 163 zettabytes (ZB) by 2025. Seagate’s IronWolf and BarraCuda Pro 12TB drives are designed for growing media storage needs – including augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), 4K resolution and 360-degree videos – and offer scalability for the future with increased space and speed. SkyHawk is the first drive created specifically for artificial intelligence (AI) enabled video surveillance solutions. Building on Seagate’s 10-year track record of delivering surveillance optimized storage performance, SkyHawk AI provides unprecedented bandwidth and processing power to manage always-on, data-intensive workloads, while simultaneously analyzing and recording footage from multiple HD cameras.
DT: What were the major challenges for your company?
Mr. Bob Yang: Big data, IoT (Internet of Things), mobility and new computing devices such as AR, VR, drones and automated cars are some of the technology trends that are disrupting the IT infrastructure. In today’s era of data explosion, it has become imperative for organizations to plan for a robust data storage infrastructure to attain business efficiencies, using these technology trends. In India, recent campaigns such as ‘Digital India’ and ‘Smart Cities’ are inescapably calling for the adoption of these technologies in various sectors. Seagate provides effective and efficient storage solutions that help organizations in transformation of their IT infrastructures in the era of digital storage. The rising demand provides Seagate the perfect opportunity and to invest further in R&D, thereby, creating numerous storage solutions across verticals and businesses.
DT: What's your channel strength currently in India?
Mr. Bob Yang: Channel strength plays an important role in an overall business scenario. They provide us with regular feedback about the requirements of their customers. Based on the feedback we receive from our channel partners, we use this information and accordingly innovate business strategy and product line. We connect with our customers and partners in every local market through the Seagate Partner Program and we will continue to work closely with them in the coming years.
DT: How do you assure your customer excellent service support?
Mr. Bob Yang: Seagate has been collaborating closely with its partners to deliver innovation in customer service and warranty offerings. The customer support network in India is spread across nationwide, includes walk-in customer warranty support centres in various states and cities. In addition, Seagate had enhanced its reach to remote areas, by offering pickup and return service for the customers who are located far away from the support facilities.
DT: What will be your key Go-To-Market Strategy for year 2018?
Mr. Bob Yang: The storage capacity demands are growing at a high speed. In recent years, we’ve seen significant growth of data creation and consumption, including the enterprise cloud market. Seagate is focused on developing the best-in-class drives and storage solutions to solve our customers’ most critical business problems as their storage workload gets heavier than ever before.
Seagate has been continuously building cloud-specialist partner base through this program, providing comprehensive training sessions and seminars as well as working on co-marketing programs. Seagate also continuously educates partners about new opportunities and carries out regular training on the products and technologies that we are introducing, so that they are able to maximize their results by offering best and optimum storage solutions to their customers.
We are also witnessing constant growth in the surveillance market. With the country’s focus on smart cities and the rising need for greater safety and security, the emphasis and relevance of video surveillance is constantly increasing. As a pioneer who developed the industry’s first surveillance drive about a decade ago, Seagate's has been committed to provide smart, safe and secure storage solutions that is best optimized for surveillance applications.
DT: What will be major products/solutions you will be launching in year 2018?
Mr. Bob Yang: Our focus continues to lie in developing innovative technologies such as shingled magnetic recording (SMR), Helium and heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) to build high capacity HDDs that address the needs of our enterprise and hyperscale data center clients who are looking for scalability, reliability, and performance.These innovations enable companies to gain more control over unstructured data, store vastly more information and retrieve it more quickly than ever before without expanding the storage footprint in the data centre.
DT: Please share your current revenue and market growth rate. What is target for year 2018?
Mr. Bob Yang: For the fiscal year 2017 which ended on June 30, 2017, Seagate reported revenue of $10.8 billion, gross margin of 29.5%, net income of $772 million and diluted earnings per share of $2.58. On a non–GAAP basis, Seagate reported gross margin of 30.5%, net income of $1.2 billion and diluted earnings per share of $4.12.We continue to see growing storage demand in the long–run driven by the proliferation of data growth from new technologies, emerging industries, and growing businesses.
