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For Immediate Release SEAGATE LAUNCHES DESIGN CENTERS WORLDWIDE TO DELIVER COMPLETE DESIGN AND TIME-TO-MARKET EXPERTISE FOR ALL COUNTRIES An industry first in providing enterprise, personal and consumer electronics makers access to Seagate's engineering design teams and labs to produce best-in-class storage-driven solutions HANOVER, Germany—13 March 2002—Seagate Technology today announced the opening of its Design Service Centers (DSC), a group of facilities created to offer a full range of research and development, design, and testing services to all Seagate customers. With locations in Colorado, Minnesota, and Singapore, each center is equipped with the appropriate testing labs and technologies to assist Seagate customers through each step of the design and development process for their storage-based solutions. DSC helps Seagate customers transform innovative product ideas into reliable storage-driven products. By working with DSC and solving problems early in the lab instead of later in development or out in the field, customers are assured that they will be able to bring products to market faster, with lower overall cost and greater reliability. Because of the expected continued growth rate in market segments that require storage, as well as the requests of Seagate customers, the facilities that were previously available only to Seagate's largest OEMs are now open and available to all Seagate customers worldwide. Many leading OEM companies such as Microsoft have already taken advantage of Seagate's services in the consumer electronics space. "Microsoft''s successful launch of the Xbox™ video game system can certainly be attributed in part to the excellent qualification cycle that occurred with Seagate's U Series disc drives," said Todd Holmdahl, general manager of Xbox Hardware at Microsoft. "As the first gaming console to include a built-in hard drive, special considerations for the employment, use, and testing of the disc drive had to be considered. Seagate's service and support was invaluable from the start of our relationship with them." "The market for personal, enterprise, and consumer electronics systems continues to grow with demand for hard drives remaining positive at a compound annual growth rate of 9.5 percent through 2005. Companies that can differentiate their product with solutions that are truly optimized for their respective markets will be able to compete more successfully," said David Reinsel, research manager at IDC. "Seagate delivers unique solutions for each of these markets. Whether creating enterprise drives that need to run in 24 by 7 by forever environments, personal ATA drives running in blade servers or NAS systems, or within a Personal video recorder or audio jukebox, it is clear that customers seeking assistance with their own designs can benefit from leveraging Seagate's hard drive design expertise." The opening of DSC marks the first time a company that produces hard disc drives has opened its doors to its entire customer base to assist in all aspects of product development. Services Consumer Electronics Seagate was the first hard drive maker to recognize the emergence of the Consumer Electronics storage market, becoming the sole supplier of hard drives to Microsoft WebTV when it first shipped in 1997. Today Seagate ships more drives for Consumer Electronics than any other hard drive maker. Seagate hard drives are the choice of all of the top ten Consumer Electronics makers, powering consumer brands Echostar Dish Network, Sony, Microsoft, RCA, DirecTV, Hewlett-Packard, Philips, Hughes, and many more. Enterprise Storage "Enterprise-class systems require maximum uptime while at the same time having the fastest performance possible, and this means that the heart of these systems - the disc drives - need to be the most reliable available as well as perform at the head of their class," said Dan Nicewander, Seagate executive director of business development. "Creating storage that fulfills these business-critical requirements in enterprise systems is a challenge, but because of Seagate's investment in its own research and development, testing, design, and time understanding all of the needs of its OEM customers, Seagate is the industry storage leader producing the disc drives of choice for the enterprise. With the Design Service Centers, this level of expertise and experience are now available for all Seagate customers." Leading direct-attached and network-storage customers such as Ciprico, Inc. have already worked closely with Seagate in the enterprise environment and have experienced the benefits. "Our relationship with Seagate goes much further than buying disc drives," said Ciprico CEO Bob Kill. "It's one of working together on quality assurance, design, and on solving performance issues. Not having the storage engineering assistance from Seagate would slow us down from being first-to-market to probably being last." Personal Storage Leading personal storage OEMs have chosen Seagate drive time and time again since Seagate's goals are squarely aligned with the OEM customers. With Seagate's knowledge of the personal storage market and of its customer base, no other company is as uniquely qualified to provide the same detailed level of service to all its customers as Seagate. For more information about Seagate's Design Service Centers, visit www.seagate.com. About Seagate Seagate, Seagate Technology and the Seagate logo are registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC. Barracuda, Cheetah and U Series are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC or one of its affiliate companies. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Seagate reserves the right to change, without notice, product offerings or specifications. About Xbox Xbox is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. |
