Scotts Valley, Calif. – Even as Seagate Technology is still working through the integration of its recently purchased competitor Maxtor, the company today rolled out a series of new storage products.
Jim Druckrey, Seagate’s VP/GM of branded solutions, said the company is now working toward creating two distinct product lines that will be fully fleshed out by the next International Consumer Electronics Show in January 2007. At that time the Maxtor brand will consists of more mass-market type storage products, while devices sporting the Seagate name will have more of a lifestyle orientation. Drucker declined to give further product specifics; however, he did say that Seagate is in the process of increasing the size of its retail product development staff and opening a new office to house the expected 140 workers. At this time last year about 10 Seagate staffers worked on the company’s retail products, Drucker said.
The Seagate branded product introductions ran the gamut from the new Mirra Sync home server to a bulked up Pocket Drive as the company positions itself as the storage supplier for what it envisions as a world where entertainment can be accessed anywhere, said Rob Pait, Seagate’s global marketing director.
Seagate is positioning itself for a world, which Pait expects to exist in about five years, where content will be downloaded from a variety of sources and then wirelessly swapped from device to device around a home. And at each stop a large amount of storage capacity will have to exist to hold the consumer’s movies, music, photos and home videos, he said.
The digital hub for the company is its Mirra Sync & Share Personal Server 2.0. The two-unit line will ship this month in 320GB and 500GB capacities with respective suggested retail prices of $499 and $599. From the server customers will be able to store and share over the web whatever content they own or created, Pait said.
At the other end of the product spectrum is the 8MB Pocket Drive which will ship in July with a $149 suggested retail price. It replaces the 6MB version that was introduced last year.
In the component segment of its business Seagate unveiled a 1.8-inch 60GB for use in portable media devices, a 2.5-inch for game consoles now with 60GB and 80GB capacities and a 3.5-inch desktop drive holding 750GB of data.
