Seagate CEO: Storage at heart of personal tech growth

A world of electronic distribution and consumer electronics devices dependent on hard drives will change the landscape for storage stalwart Seagate Technology, whose enterprise IT business will become increasingly less significant.

According to Seagate CEO Bill Watkins, while other big names in storage such as EMC have found software increasingly lucrative, a storage media company cannot stand still as the world of personal tech changes around it.

He said in an interview with silicon.com: "We're going from physical to electronic distribution of content, getting rid of film, tapes, CDs and DVDs. Much of this is self-generated - MySpace, Flickr and so on."

With a nod to the mass market, he added "kids want to share these files... and at the centre of all this is a storage device".

Is consumer tech driving IT?

IT director Luke Mellors reckons there's a case to say it is, while a majority of our CIO Jury at the start of the year had to agree.

Seagate likes to air figures that show industry enterprise storage revenues stagnant since about 2001 - more has been sold progressively but prices have been falling, cancelling out any gains - whereas storage around kit such as desktop PCs has increased ever-so-slightly, laptops more so and consumer electronics exploding since about 2004.

He said: "If you're in just the client-server IT world then it's single digit growth. If you've got a consumer play, it's just phenomenal, it's double-digit growth."

Phil Tee, chairman and CTO at storage software company Njini, said: "In the last 40 years, storage, and all IT, has been business-driven. But now the consumer market will see vendors taking risks. They get it."

silicon.com columnist and noted futurologist Peter Cochrane wrote more than two years ago about the possibility of all the music and movies ever recorded fitting onto solitary digital devices - and said that day would soon be arriving.

Watkins has a similar view and believes that by using digital rights management technology that will happen legally and with the co-operation of rights holders.

One opportunity, he said, is publishing thousands of old computer games on single drives, as the market tends to be all about newer products, since it's hard to make money from older titles.

As well as its main media manufacturing hub in Singapore, Seagate has well-known facilities in Northern Ireland, lauded at the end of last year as a nanotech 'centre of excellence'. However, Watkins was keen to downplay that moniker.

He said: "We're using probe storage that is just about different techniques, more similar to solid state or flash storage maybe. But we wouldn't describe it that way, as nanotech."