Seagate to step up its rewards for partners

Seagate is working closely with partners towards business development and market expansion. Under its Seagate Partner Program, the company is stepping up 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. Sharad Srivastava, Country Manager, Indian Sub-Continent, Seagate Distribution Singapore Pvt Ltd, said "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," added Srivastava. The company is now aggressively making inroads into some of the unexplored terrain. "We will promote the wired life style with p-commerce or pipeline commerce," added 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.

(CNS)