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Seagate says mobile and cloud computing boosted sales


The disk storage industry is getting a boost from new technologies including mobile and cloud computing, 2011 fiscal data from disk manufacturer Seagate suggest. According to Seagate's end of fiscal year 2011 financial results this July, the storage company was able to ship a record 52 million units in the past quarter and year-round shipments breached the 199 million mark. With this performance, the firm reported $2.9 billion in total revenue for the quarter just past and $11 billion for the fiscal year. “Seagate and the industry are benefiting from the significant demand for storage related to new applications and architectures associated with mobile and connected devices," said Steve Luczo, Seagate chairman, president and CEO. Luczo said that cloud service providers and data centers are fuelling the demand for disk storage around the world, since hard disk drive storage is the fundamental technology for all these services and components. "Total industry demand grew almost 40 percent in fiscal year 2011 to 330 million terabytes," Luczo added. "As more online content and services become available to billions of connected mobile devices, we expect demand for storage capacity to continue to grow." Hard disk storage manufacturers, however, are advised not to rest on their laurels as impending cannibalization from media tablets and Solid State Drives might take away their thunder, according to research firm IDC. As more and more businesses and consumers move to cloud storage infrastructure, IDC said hard disk manufacturers should be able to harness such demand in order to ensure growth. "The HDD industry needs to shift its R&D priorities, giving more attention to developing faster HDD performance for PC markets while simultaneously delivering HDD capacity advancements to support enterprise storage growth demands," said John Rydning, research director for Storage Mechanisms - Disk at IDC. Should manufacturers heed this advice, the global industry revenue could grow from $33.4 billion in 2010 to $48.2 billion in 2015, according to IDC. — With JM Tuazon/VS, GMA News

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