Seagate Launching Cloud Builder Alliance

Seagate Technology LLC announced the Seagate Cloud Builder Alliance, a strategic partner category within the company’s existing Seagate Partner Program.

The new program provides technical information, customer insights, market knowledge and delivers partners the tools needed to expand their businesses providing cloud storage technology. It highlights system builders that design, integrate, and deliver custom servers and storage systems used in cloud data centers.

Through the Cloud Builder Alliance, partners will receive business and technology planning, sales and marketing resources, lead generation, training and certification, and system reference design development from Seagate Design Centers globally. The program will also equip members with dedicated sales tools including a cloud sales playbook, market insights and customer presentations. Select partners will collaborate with Seagate on solution development and reference designs, PR and marketing initiatives, and strategic direction and business planning.

Seagate Cloud Builder Alliance participants include:

"Seagate has a broad portfolio of storage solutions that are already deployed widely by leading cloud providers around the globe. 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," said Scott Horn, Seagate VP of marketing.

Seagate is a provider for cloud compute and cloud storage environments, providing a portfolio that includes the Pulsar family of performance SSDs, 2.5-inch Savvio 10K and Savvio 15K HDDs for mission-critical environments, and the energy-efficient Constellation HDD family for multiple terabyte configurations.

From the perspective of system builders, the shift of application workloads to the cloud is changing market dynamics, and players in the cloud supply chain must deliver customized platforms that are smarter and more flexible. To gain a competitive advantage in this environment, system builders must develop the ability to customize and optimize their solutions and launch new sales and marketing strategies that will enable them to evangelize the cloud.

"Reliability and performance in a storage solution are key criteria for Ciara’s cloud initiative. Seagate’s mission critical and business critical products meet and exceed both of these criteria. Intimate knowledge of the storage industry and a thorough understanding of Ciara’s leading edge offerings make Seagate the natural partner of choice for Ciara’s cloud initiative," said Jonathan Ahdoot, EVP of sales and marketing at Ciara Technologies.

"Since 2000, Intequus has delivered custom computing solutions to ISV, OEM, cloud and data center customers. Seagate is our cloud storage partner, because Seagate understands our customer’s needs, provides strong engineering and technical support, and delivers products that exceed cloud storage specifications. Both companies have developed a strong cloud relationship that will not only provide today’s best-of-breed cloud solutions, but also drive the future cloud as it evolves," said Dave Guzzi, VP and GM at Intequus.

"NuCloud has relied heavily on Seagate to help us optimize our cloud data centers for sustained performance, reduced environmental footprint, total cost reduction, system reliability, product endurance, and storage scalability, all focused on supporting cloud services. NuCloud has worked a long time with Seagate to establish a critically important strategic relationship, primarily in China, but now reaching worldwide. Seagate has always been a strong and reliable partner; providing the drive functionality and performance we need for our products at a price very competitive with the current demands of the marketplace," said Harry Haury, CEO and chairman of NuCloud Global.

"Seagate provides us with the products and information we need to be successful in cloud storage. The high-quality and competitively priced product lines cover the key performance points, capacities and interfaces that our customers are interested in," said Eva Cherry, president and CEO of Silicon Mechanics.

"Seagate provides the most advanced, high performance HDD and SSD technologies and a complete range of products that match Supermicro’s quality, reliability and performance expectations for our cloud-optimized server and storage solutions. A long-term business relationship is the goal for Supermicro and Seagate," said Charles Liang, president, CEO and chairman of the board at Supermicro.

"Xyratex has a long standing leadership position in delivering enterprise data storage solutions to its OEM customers and is highly recognized in the industry. A key to Xyratex’s success is its strategic relationships with leading companies, like Seagate, that provide synergistic solutions with our own. Xyratex continues to have a strong and growing technology relationship with Seagate from reciprocal quality assurance and reliability testing of each company’s solutions to strategic product development engagements. Our participation in Seagate’s Cloud Builder program is in line with our strong focus on developing solutions for our OEMs that meet the quality and performance demands of the vloud and HPC markets," said Mike Stolz, VP of marketing and alliances at Xyratex.

"ZT Systems provides custom server and storage solutions engineered to match the requirements of individual cloud and scale compute customers. Seagate’s premium storage products and our close working relationship help ZT design ‘precision-fit’ solutions that deliver each individual customer’s optimal mix of performance, energy efficiency and cost-effectiveness," said Brent Miller, VP marketing and business planning at ZT Systems.