With the Middle East’s IT storage industry evolving at a rapid pace over the past few years, Seagate geared up to host stakeholders from across the region’s IT channel at its annual “Seagate Middle East Partner Conference” which took place on February 12th at the Grand Hyatt Dubai.
During this year’s forum the focus was on how greater mobility, requirements for deeper data analytics, and the shift towards open-source technology will propel the IT sector’s growth over the next 12 months. Through a series of exclusive solution demos and partner workshops, organizers previewed how businesses in the Middle East can better leverage through recent breakthroughs in storage technology to establish greener and more reliable IT systems.
“Today there really are monumental transformations happening within the region’s data storage market as a result of new advancements in the areas such as cloud economics, flash storage capabilities, and rewritable disk capabilities,” notes Christian Assaf, Senior Sales Manager, MEA, Turkey and Greece at Seagate. “We recognize the challenges of technology transitions and the support required in order for businesses to step confidently into these digital frontiers. The Middle East in particular is a region where IT infrastructure development is set prominently on the public agenda, and in light of this, we feel it is essential to create regular forums in which vendors, channel partners, and end users can connect on today’s big issues. That is what the Seagate Middle East Partner Conference aims to deliver.”
Alongside this year’s program, Assaf and other senior managers from Seagate’s EMEA division outlined the latest additions to the company’s Seagate Partner Program (SPP), opening up more channels through which distributors can benefit from collaborative technical training, access to global sales support, and more compelling incentive schemes.
Within the Middle East, Seagate has recently placed increased emphasis on the roll out of a new class of video surveillance, SSHD, NAS, enterprise and cloud technologies. This has included Seagate’s latest Enterprise Turbo SSHD, released as the world’s fastest hard drive, as well as a new network-attached storage HDD lineup and two new enterprise HDD offerings.
Seagate’s advancements in the hybrid disk market and flash technology in particular has been bolstered through tie ups with the likes of Virident Systems last year; a strategic agreement seeing the companies jointly deliver solutions for the growing enterprise flash-storage market. Over the past year Seagate and IBM have also collaborated on an enterprise SSHD prototype, bench-testing the unit in their labs with a view to integrate it into IBM System x servers.
