Seagate to step up its rewards for partners

MOHIT CHHABRA

Seagate is working closely with partners towards business development and

market expansion. Under its Seagate Partner Program, the company is stepping up

its rewards for partners with a philosophy of 'incentives with recognition'.

As the hard disk drive business fast evolves into commodity trading, Seagate

wants its partners to sell value through its storage solutions. While the

company's core focus remains hard disk drives, its immediate priority is to

bring to the market consumer electronics with storage capacity.

While gadgets like personal video recorders, gaming consoles and desktop

devices that come with Seagate hard drives will contribute to a healthier

bottomline for the company and the partners, Seagate expects to keep the topline

headed north with hard drives. Says Sharad Srivastava, Country Manager, Indian

Sub-Continent, Seagate Distribution Singapore Pvt Ltd, "Hard disk drives

will remain our core business while we will focus on storage solutions."

Demand

generation is a key activity that the company has undertaken to expand the

partners’ business activities. "We are planning to target more and more

verticals," says Srivastava. The company is now aggressively making inroads

into some of the unexplored terrains. "We will promote the wired life style

with p-commerce or pipeline commerce," adds Srivastava. A concept that will

largely be driven by bandwidth and storage, he feels.

The company is engaged in a constant process of evolving and exploring new

areas of opportunity. XIOTech, a 100 percent owned subsidiary is focussed on

developing SAN solutions, while CETEC, a Colorado-based research laboratory is

focusing on developing storage solutions for consumer electronic goods.

As part of its innovative storage solution, Seagate launched an external hard

disk drive in the 20 and 40 GB variants to cater to the fast growing need to

transport huge volumes of data. "A portable hard drive ensures reliable

swapping of information," said Srivastava.