GEC NEWS WIREOrganizations and cities in the GCC are going through a massive transformation. Both are riding the bandwagon of being ‘Smart’ and ‘Intelligence-driven’. From automated and digitized organizational infrastructure to smart roads, smart meters and smart grids in the city, IoT and data analytics are driving the race.
According to Data Age 2025, a report from Seagate and analyst firm IDC, it is predicted that data creation will swell to a total of 163 zettabytes (ZB) by 2025. Machine learning, automation and machine-to-machine technologies are shifting the bulk of data creation from consumers to the enterprise; in 2025 enterprises will create 60 percent of the world’s data.
Seagate has seen a massive growth in their surveillance and storage portfolio in 2017. Stephen Jones, Surveillance Sales Engineer at Seagate said, “We closed our financial year very strongly with record shipments. We believe that we are very strongly positioned in the surveillance market and have an equally strong portfolio of surveillance and storage products.” At Intersec 2018 Seagate exhibited its industry leading surveillance storage technologies, with demonstrations of its SkyHawk, SkyHawk AI and Exos X12 products and solutions from partners Hikvision and Dahua. “Skyhawk is from our hard drive family that is specifically designed and optimized for AI applications. AI and machine learning are the buzzwords now. Though, at this moment, we are not certain where this trend will lead to in future, this is what people are excited about now. Today we are in a unique position to offer anything from HDD to surveillance to flash,” he adds.
Talking about the clash between providing customers with memory enough to store the massive amount of data and giving them the facility to store what’s important and what’s not important, Stephen says, “Recording mundane amount of video recordings and retaining it is not what your operators want but to be alerted on what is important. Here, video analytics and AI plays a pivotal role. Our solutions and products deliver accurate, real time information to the operators so that they can efficiently drive the operations and also provide high level surveillance report. Furthermore, the largest component of this future growth will be in embedded devices such as security cameras, smart meters, chip cards and vending machines. Technology – and storage in particular – will have an increasingly important role in tapping the potential of all this data,” he adds.
Talking about the future of enterprise storage, Stephen says that they are seeing a move to the edge. “The term edge is enterprise hardened storage that does not reside in poor or traditional data centers as we see a massive improvement in the processing power in the end device— here the end device being the camera. We will see more storage at the edge. It records the video, analyzes it, puts it to storage then retain the information for a period of time and take out the important stuff and offload that to the traditional cloud. This is where we see the future of storage going.”
Seagate is also investing heavily in its partner program. “We have recently changed our partner program and now it is called the Seagate insider. It is specifically designed for the Sis. From a strategic point of view, we see a demand creation in the market from the System Integrators.”
Stephen signs off by saying that simplicity defines the entire Seagate portfolio. “Our message is very simple—right drive, right application.
