—By June Coates
Seagate showcased its full range of storage solutions last month at the Middle East’s biggest tech show.
The GITEX Technology Week, which ran Oct. 20-24 at Dubai’s World Trade Center, drew more than 139,000 attendees from 144 countries.
Seagate demonstrated its Enterprise Turbo solid-state hybrid drive, which delivers up to three times the performance of traditional 15K-RPM hard drives. The company also demonstrated its cloud-storage and consumer products, including its NAS HDD for 1- to 5-bay network-attached storage systems, its 1TB Wireless Plus drive for streaming hundreds of movies, songs and photos, and its compact 500GB Seagate Slim drive for backing up content and saving and sharing social media.
To further encourage visitors to its booth, Seagate held a social-media campaign, in which participants could register for a chance to win a gold-plated Seagate Slim drive valued at $2,000.
Diane El Hachem, Seagate’s channel marketing manager in EMEA, said the rise of cloud-computing and an increased use of flash storage are generating considerable growth opportunities for Seagate.
According to Seagate market research estimates, over 60 percent of the world’s data will be stored in cloud infrastructures by 2020, up from 25 percent in 2011. Hard drive manufacturers shipped 524 million disk drives in 2012—more than 10 times the 39 million flash drives shipped during that period, according to iSuppli. Flash shipments, however, are expected to reach 239 million units by 2016. IDC, meanwhile, estimated that by 2017, the industry will ship more hybrid drives into the client space than it does traditional HDDs.
“The global storage market is both growing and changing rapidly, and these shifts in the industry are very prevalent in the EMEA region,” El Hachem said. “In particular, we want to take full advantage of the huge potential we see in areas such as cloud computing and solid state drives—we believe they will be key drivers for our business in the foreseeable future.”
She added that GITEX Technology Week is “an excellent forum for us to reinforce our strong presence in the Middle East and an opportunity to demonstrate to a global audience that our innovative products are continuing to deliver unsurpassed capacity, speed and reliability.”
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