In an exclusive gathering in Singapore Mobility caught up with Mr. B.S. Teh, Senior Vice- President, Global Sales and Sales Operations, Seagate to talk about current and future trends of storage.
Cloud and Storage
“By 2020, 70% data is expected to be stored on cloud and non-PC areas and only 30% will be on PCs. In our industry, we have the top class technology and products for storage. The three companies, Amazon, Google and Microsoft, are investing 80 billion dollars on cloud, of this, a big chunk, 20 billion dollars, will be spent on storage. According to Gartner, the number of companies developing some cloud storage policy has seen a rapid increase, though every company will not go completely into cloud. According to IDC report, demand for services based on analytics and big data is going to increase by 100-fold in the coming few years, which will eventually translate into storage requirements. Today, even customer profile is changing—so far we have been working with SMEs, but in future hyper-scale companies are expected to contribute to storage in a big way. That is where more profit is expected to come from.”
Big data and analytics
Today prevalence of big data and analytics is increasing and emerging as a lucrative segment for memory devices. Drone market is witnessing a rapid growth. Globally drones are widely being used to take videos. Earlier, drones were limited to military and scientific labs, but presently, demand for consumer and commercial drones has seen a phenomenal increase during the last few years offering an exciting opportunity for memory products. There are some companies which take pictures of monuments, like Taj Mahal, and offer them as creative VR products to the users giving a real experience to those who cannot visit all those monuments. All these offer a great opportunity for memory devices.
AR and VR
Mr. Teh comments, “Today AR and VR devices are becoming more effective and efficient with new advancements in technology evolving rapidly and with prices coming down considerably and a variety of devices available to the consumers. Consumer and commercial drones, supported by AR and VR, offer a good opportunity for our memory products. Security and surveillance at their physical premises has become a very important concept for most companies today. Monitoring traffic is another excellent example where surveillance cameras are installed and the captured images need a huge memory to be stored before the data can be analyzed as and when needed. Last year, over 100 million surveillance cameras have been sold worldwide, of which 70% are network cams and 30% other cameras. Surveillance process includes capturing the images, storing and analyzing. There is lot of data generation, which has to be stored on servers. All these offer a big opportunity for storage providers like us,” continues Mr Teh.
Over the years the amount of information stored has grown from Megabytes all the way to Terabytes and now to Geopbytes, confirming the need to successfully store and access huge amounts of data. As demand for storage technology grows, the need for greater efficiency and more advanced capabilities continues to evolve.
Surveillance market
Currently, in big towns and cities in India, safety and security has become prime concerns for organizations. Naturally, surveillance systems in India have become an indispensable part of the country’s infrastructure. We have seen an upsurge of the focus in this domain. According to a research study, the Indian Video Surveillance market is expected to reach $8 billion by 2022 leading to huge amount of data generation. Today, surveillance cameras being set up at railway stations, housing estates, traffic signals, metro stations, markets, public parks, banks, hospital, hotels, big bus stations, educational institutes, etc at an increasing rate resulting in an enormous amounts of unstructured data being generated and stored. Keeping in view, the demand for efficient and reliable storage technologies, Seagate plans to play a bigger role in India with its cutting edge technology. Seagate will continue to innovate and offer our partners and customers an extensive range of surveillance storage products and solutions that are safe, smart and secure for their surveillance applications,” adds Mr Teh.
“Today data storage is more than just archiving; it’s about providing ways to analyze information, understand patterns and behavior, to relive experiences and memories. It is about harnessing stored information for growth and innovation. Seagate is building on its heritage of storage leadership to solve the challenge of getting more out of the living information that is produced every day. What began with one storage innovation has morphed into many systems and solutions becoming faster, more reliable and expansive. No longer is it just about storing information; it is about accessing and interpreting information quickly, accurately and securely” Mr. B.S. Teh, Seagate.
