14 DAY TRIAL // Seagate is one of the three remaining great providers of hard disk drives, rivaled by Western Digital and trailed, rather distantly, by Toshiba. That doesn't mean that the corporation isn't involved in other things though.
While the field of cloud storage is not the same thing as hard disk drive manufacture and marketing, it still falls within Seagate's business practices.
In fact, the company has decided to be one of the proactive factors in this market segment, not a reactive one.
Seagate has created the Cloud Builder Alliance, a strategic partner category within the Seagate partner Program.
NuCloud Global, Supermicro, Xyratex, Ciara Technologies and ZT Systems are just a few of the member companies.
The purpose of the consortium is to provide technical information, market knowledge and customer rights to partners, in addition to delivering the cloud storage tools needed to expand their businesses.
“Seagate has a broad portfolio of storage solutions that are already deployed widely by leading cloud providers around the globe,” said Scott Horn, Seagate vice president of marketing.
“The Seagate Cloud Alliance is an exciting new program to enable our cloud-focused system builder community to deepen their capability to design and deploy solutions that will accelerate private and public cloud adoption and grow their businesses.”
Partners in the Cloud Builder Alliance will receive training and certification, system reference design development info, sales and marketing resources and aid in business and technology planning.
Seagate's announcement names the 2.5-inch Savvio 10K and Savvio 15K HDDs, plus the Pulsar SSD family, as the most important building blocks of the initiative, but we are fairly certain SSHDs (solid-state hybrid drives) will also play their part.
On that note, once the storage giant finds a good SSD company to buy, it will have an even better grasp of the market it is trying to lead.