Seagate Technology Opens Up Patents

Seagate Technology plc signed the Open Covid Pledge.

The pledge grants free access to all of Seagate’s patented technologies to help enable diagnosing, preventing, containing, and treating of Covid-19.

The mission of the Open Covid Pledge is to provide access to every tool at the disposal of businesses and society toward the goal of rapid development and deployment of technologies in a massive scale without impediment, in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Seagate’s mission is to maximize the potential of humanity,” said Dr. Dave Mosley, CEO, Seagate. “Never has that been more important than during the Covid-19 pandemic. Collaboration is going to be key in the efforts to fight the disease and minimize the lasting impact. The Open Covid Pledge is another of the amazing ways we can all work together, and Seagate is proud to be a part of this pledge to help enable critical access to powerful solutions for the good of humanity.”

The company has already begun to take proactive steps in helping organizations around the world fight back against the pandemic.

Few examples:

• At the onset of emergency in China, the firm donated critical medical supplies to several hospitals in China’s Hubei Province, including 3 fully equipped negative-pressure ambulances.

• The firm contributed storage and compute resources and employees volunteered their expertise to drive a positive impact on Folding@home’s Covid-19 program. Folding@home is a distributed-computing project that relies on a global network of volunteers who run complex simulations of protein dynamics on their PCs. The insights from data are helping scientists better understand how diseases occur so they can develop targeted therapeutics. After a little more than a month of contributing to this project, the company’s team has produced results, vaulting into the top one percent of worldwide teams in terms of productivity, with more than 9,000 completed work units. The faster a team can complete a work unit, the faster scientists can get to work studying these proteins and finding treatments for diseases like Alzheimer’s, Covid-19, cancer and more.

• Seagate and Vent-19, a nonprofit developing affordable rapidly mass producible solutions to help people breathe with ventilators and other biomedical devices, are working together to apply the firm’s strengths in high technology, high volume, and low-cost solutions to help fight the impact of Covid-19.

• Additionally, as part of the company’s long-term commitment to fuel its ‘Data4Good’ program, a number of Seagate employees have volunteered their data science expertise and time to help various organizations focused on solving key issues associated with the pandemic. The program identifies opportunities for employees to directly contribute their skills and a portion of their time to fight against Covid-19 and makes it easy to apply their skills to bring about positive social impact.