By David A. Chapa, CTE, Office of the CTO, Seagate CSS
This past July, during our world wide sales meeting, our sale rep who covers Southern Europe and the Middle East asked if I would travel to Dubai to speak at an event he was planning. My immediate thought was that Dubai seemed an awfully long trip so I initially pushed back…explaining, “as much as I would like to, I think we really need to justify this trip. But I was curious so I peppered my colleague with these questions:
- What is the opportunity?
- Who is the target?
- What’s the revenue potential for the balance of this fiscal year?
- What are the projections for next year?
- Is this a strategic territory?
- What is our plan for the region?
- Who will be at this event?
While he didn’t have all of the answers to my questions, he did have answers for most. During a week-long trip we conducted 8 meetings, hosted an event with enough room for 25 participants for which 35 registered and 22 attended. What’s so significant about these numbers? Well, let me also explain that this was during GITEX Technology Week, the biggest technology event in Dubai. This is the event everyone attends, if you are in technology. The fact that we were able to attract 22 people out of the 35 registered to a hotel in the Dubai Marina area during the week of GITEX speaks louder than you can imagine.
The market here is hungry for what Seagate CSS has to offer, and the opportunities we uncovered, are amazingly large. Many partners, and customers alike see the value in our High Performance Computing (HPC) platform, especially since oil and gas exploration is quite a large market here in the Middle East.
We also saw a great deal of interest in one of our key pillars – building private and hybrid clouds, which leans squarely in our wheelhouse.
For tape users the value of storing data for long term preservation in the cloud is becoming more and more clear. Take it from me, tape is cheap; I ought to know because I lived in that world for a while. But it does get expensive when you have data that you “think” you will never access, but realize, for a variety of reasons and purposes, is needed. Because it can take too long time to retrieve (large volumes of) data from tape storage it doesn’t serve today’s customer needs. For this reason, over the past year we’ve been explaining our Long-Term Storage Service (LTS2). Unlike tape, LTS2 is driven by an object storage model. Now, with an “on premise” tape replacement solution that replicates to the cloud, customers are able to respond much more quickly to requests for these data sets. This means that data is able to be monetized in seconds or minutes versus tape, which can take hours or even days.
Such is the case with many we talked to here in Dubai. There is a greater need to embrace a cloud based hybrid storage model, either completely replacing tape or greatly reducing its footprint in the data center. Yes, I wrote this from Dubai as I was reflecting on an absolutely amazing week of customer engagements, partner meetings, and presentations at our event in the Dubai Marina. Overall the response to our messaging and positioning, could not have been better. This was well worth the time, and I hope to see bigger and greater things in this region in the very near future!!
Chapa, signing off
