Seagate gives 5-year warranty

Channels partners break into a jig

Channel community across the country has welcomed Seagate's
decision to introduce a five-year warranty. The move is likely to provide a
fillip to Seagate India operations. Coming at a time when other HDD vendors like
Maxtor and Samsung are providing one-year and three-year warranty—the Seagate
initiative is likely to entrench the brand in the Indian market.

The warranty effective on every Seagate internal PC, notebook
and enterprise hard drive shipped through its distribution and retail chan-nels
throughout the world applies retroactively to app-licable hard drives shipped
since June 1, 2004.

Applauding the decision, Hariharan Ishwar, General Manager—CCG
at Ingram Micro said, "It is a very good sign for the industry. I am sure
that a lot of system integrators and end customers will find this offer very
attractive. This will eventually increase the market share of Seagate in India
to a great an extent."

Echoing the same thought Manoj Gupta, Director at Delhi-based
Fortune Market-ing stated that the initiative will increase the marketshare of
Seagate and will give an edge to the company in competing with players like
Samsung and Maxtor.

The move will also incr-ease the Seagate demand on the system
integration front, believes Alok Garodia, MD

of Kolkata-based Jupiter International Ltd.

"If we look at component level warranty then-a CPU comes
with three-year warranty and motherboard with two-year warranty. So, overall SIs
will have a great oppor-tunity to provide warranty on computer systems as a
whole. This way the end customer will be benefited to a large extent," he
said.

To meet the demand of market dynamics Seagate will be increasing
its replacement centers by 40 percent from the current count of 33.

Zia Askari

New Delhi (CyberMedia News)