Seagate CEO Luczo talked with Barron’s about the company’s evolved business and brand.
Whether you’re an existing Seagate partner or customer, or just interested in being one, you probably saw our announcements at CES — we unveiled a dramatic rebranding of the company that reflects how our rapidly expanding solutions portfolio is helping consumers, businesses and partners create, preserve and share their most precious content and data.
And you’ve seen the new Seagate Living Logo … a patent-pending dynamic representation of the constantly changing, collective human experience.
What’s so important about a new logo?
Well, that misses the point, really. The new Seagate living logo is only the most obvious new indication of our business evolution that’s been underway for quite a while — an evolution in our customers’ needs, in the way we develop products, in the breadth of expertise and solutions we’re now providing.
How is Seagate’s brand — and business — changing?
What does all this really mean? How does an evolved Seagate — the brand, the solutions, and the way we do business — serve our partners?
In this article in Barron’s, our CEO Steve Luczo spoke with reporter Tiernan Ray during CES, and gave one of the best descriptions I’ve seen yet of the evolution of Seagate’s mission, function, and role in the cloud and mass data technosphere.
Here are some of the key insights Luczo offered:
- “We are getting pulled in some interesting directions by our customers,” said Luczo, referring to cloud service providers (CSPs). (The article’s author Ray gave Amazon and Google as examples of big cloud companies.)
- “The CSP business is approaching 20% to 30% of Seagate’s total volume of product on an annual basis,” said Luczo.
- The biggest CSPs have been building huge data centers for many years with servers handling exponentially more data every year. As a result they come to Seagate looking for efficient ways to deploy massive custom storage systems.
- Seagate now works individually with CSPs to incorporate system-level tasks as it builds storage systems customized to the needs of each CSP, whose architectures vary.
- Systems companies who’ve previously sold standardized hardware into data centers, but whose greatest expertise is in software, are moving towards focusing on software while leaving systems-level customization to Seagate’s expertise.
- Seagate has broadened its core component capabilities into systems capabilities by acquiring IP and expertise from companies like LSI, and via the deployment of hundreds of chip engineers whose work includes customization on-site with customers.
- Seagate has the industry’s greatest understanding of systems engineering as it relates to the efficiency and performance of storage media, Luczo pointed out. “Remember, this is stuff we’re very good at: People forget we are testing millions of drives all the time.”
- Seagate’s evolving business, in which it sells essentially finished storage systems to equipment makers and to CSPs, “is ramping pretty quickly,” said Luczo. “I think that business will be on a billion dollar run rate in a year from now.”
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Who is John Paulsen? A former small-business leader myself, I feel your pain (and joy) and hope you’ll enjoy the blog. I launched and ran a well-regarded production company in San Francisco with a team of 9 brilliant, hard working people. I learned to manage a wide array of tasks a small business must handle — business strategy, facilities design, HR, payroll, taxes, marketing, all the way down to choosing telecom equipment and spec’ing a server system to help my team collaborate in real-time on dense media projects from multiple production rooms. I’ve partnered with and learned from dozens of small business owners.
