Seagate's Lance Ohara comments on the storage needs of the modern consumer

We recently got a chance to interact with Lance Ohara, Senior Director of Product Lifecycle Management, Seagate Technology. Here’s what he had to say on the future of Seagate, its product lineup and on the evolving needs of the consumer. Disclaimer: All answers have been edited in the interest of brevity and are not the exact words of Lance Ohara. However, every effort has been taken to ensure that the substance of his responses is unaltered. Cloud services such as Google Photos, Flickr and YouTube have taken over our storage needs. Streaming services such as Apple Music, YouTube and even Netflix are taking over our content consumption needs. How is Seagate planning to stay relevant in the consumer space in the face of all this? Are you still seeing strong demand for storage devices in this space? The consumerisation of IT, big data and enterprise mobility have brought the rise of cloud computing—which have created increasingly connected data ecosystems, and this is driving demand for digital storage capacity.The cloud has been regarded as a threat to traditional storage solutions, but that is an incorrect assumption. All the data on the cloud is stored in a physical data centre and the need for an intelligent and reliable storage solution is paramount.  Seagate has a broad storage portfolio offering products that are optimised for cloud computing and storage as well as personal clouds. The Seagate Backup Plus for example, comes with 200GB of Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage and also offers the option of creating your own personal cloud. Seagate claims to offer an “efficient yet stylish” storage device that appeals to the “young technology enthusiast. Please elaborate on that. Seagate’s product line includes some of the slimmest devices on the market, including the only portable 4TB device, from Seagate’s Backup Line. We incorporate an attractive design with appealing colors such as Red, Blue, Silver, Black, White and our new Rose Gold. Our new Backup Plus Ultra Slim that we announced at CES 2016 is the world’s thinnest 2TB in the market: 50% thinner than our competition.  The Seagate Seven is another great example, it’s the world’s slimmest 500GB portable at only 7mm thick. The stainless steel case and ability to absorb shocks and bumps, coupled with the design, earned it the iF and Red Dot Design awards. Other Seagate services like the Seagate Media App and Dashboard help to manage, share, view and backup files. The Seagate Lyve app also helps in the management and organisation of photos. Where do you see SSDs fitting in the consumer space? Is speed more important than capacity for the current generation of consumer? There are a number of important factors to consider while choosing an SSD (Solid State Drive) or an HDD (Hard Disk Drive), As with most important decisions, consumers have to choose the option that can best meet their unique needs. SSDs are thin, light and fast, perfect for workstations and gaming PCs that need that speed. That said, they’re very expensive in terms of storage capacity. On the other hand, HDDs are workhorses when it comes to sheer capacity and how much data can be stored, but lacks on the speed aspect when compared to an SSD. We feel that speed and capacity are both important to current generation consumers and an SSHD (Solid State Hybrid Drive) would be the ideal solution. It melds the best of both worlds, speed and capacity, at an affordable price tag.  Our LaCie product line, including the LaCie Chrome cater to that audience that requires speed and capacity. The products offer striped 500GB SSD (M.2 in the case of Chrome) offering a total of 1TB storage at incredible speeds. Connectivity is provided by Thunderbolt 2 or USB 3.1 Type C Gen 2, offering incredible transfer rates of up to 5GBps. How is Seagate positioning itself in comparison to rivals like Samsung, Western Digital and the like? What do they offer that’s unique and/or special in this regard? The storage industry is highly competitive. Having said that, Seagate still stands out to be the global leader in this industry. We design and manufacture our own heads and media and we are the only drive company that manufactures its own test equipment and has extensive IP in this critical technology area. It is also important to note that Seagate has been recognized by Gartner as being one of the top 25 companies worldwide in supply chain management. Seagate offers the industry’s broadest portfolio of hard drives, solid-state drives and solid-state hybrid drives. With the introduction of Cloud Systems and Silicon Solutions, Seagate is building on its legacy, extending innovation from the device into the information infrastructure, both on-site and in the cloud. The PC market has been declining year over year, how has that affected Seagate? If you look at the amount of capacity that is shipped industry-wide, you will see that the PC market landscape has not negatively affected the business. According to an IDC survey, the total amount of data created in the world is doubling every two years, by 2020, the digital data will grow nearly 20 times and reach 40 Zettabytes. Growth in mobile, personal devices, video surveillance, and Big Data analytics are all trends that will continue creating significant demand for next-generation storage systems and solutions. There is also going to be a whole new set of clients and some of them are robots, augmented virtual reality machines, 3D printing, autonomous vehicles and new classes of entertainment devices or drones. All these things are new clients that are going to take advantage of this massive amount of data and also contribute to the massive amount of data. We think that the overall market for these new clients will be bigger than the PC market in the near future. In the consumer space, there has been an upsurge in the number of smartphone users in the country. Seagate believes that portable and wireless storage drives will become a lifestyle standard for consumers. Consumers are creating more and more content and requirements for capacity have risen. What does Seagate have to say on the data storage needs of the modern consumer? Home and personal entertainment forms a significant part of the consumer connected device marketplace. In this digital age, consumers want more flexibility in terms of watching TV, sharing photos, accessing music etc. As mentioned earlier, consumers are creating more content than ever before. Their need for storage space is also increasing. Consumers are more aware of their needs and portability, capacity and data security are their priorities. In this regard, Seagate’s Backup Plus Slim is gaining a lot of traction. Growing broadband coverage will also add to these needs. What sort of market do you see for consumer NAS setups? What are Seagate’s plans in that space? Modern consumer today welcomes innovative technology to satiate their data storage needs. They are quite comfortable to set up their own NAS setups. We offer Seagate Personal Cloud, which is a popular consumer NAS device. It’s advantage is that coupled with the Media App, the platform allows users to easily stream content to their devices and also serves as a central backup. Seagate is committed to provide innovative solutions to its consumers as per their needs. Seagate is working towards developing more such products that enable its customers to truly enrich their lives.