BILL WATKINS SEAGATE
TECHNOLOGY ‘S
SUCCESS

Team Work and High Product Quality

SEAGATE TECHNOLOGY, picked by Forbes Magazine as the “Company of the Year” for 2006, is the world leader in the design, manufacture and marketing of hard disc drives for information storage.

Seagate’s president and chief executive officer William “Bill” Watkins said this recognition was arrived at because of the proliferation of the company’s wardwinning products, which resulted from the high level of team work among its personnel.

Last year, Seagate rode on an increasing demand for digital storage and had sales valued at $8.57 billion, with profits amounting to $1.07 billion, according to Forbes data. This year, industry analysts predict that Seagate’s sales will reach $9 billion.

Seagate is headquartered at Scotts Valley in California’s technology hub in the Silicon Valley. In 2005 its assets were estimated at $5.43 billion and had a marketable value of $12.95 billion. The company has about 44,000 employees worldwide.

Bill Watkins joined Seagate in 1996 when Seagate bought Conner Peripherals, a San Jose disc drive company where he was then a senior vice president. He did not want to be in the merger, but was persuaded to stay and be part of a bigger technology organization. It was his belief that most mergers were bound to fail.

By 2000, Bill Watkins has become Seagate’s chief operating officer. The technology turndown came in the early 2000s and some industry analysts began to consider Seagate as a failing company.

During that period, Bill Watkins initiated a program designed to boost the morale of Seagate employees and build a high level of team spirit among them. He also persuaded management to invest in strengthening the company’s manufacturing infrastructure and its research and development sector, even in the face of a contracting market. Both programs paid off big for Seagate.

The morale building program, which Bill Watkins calls Eco Seagate, consists of a week-long retreat which ends in an adventure race. The course is often described as highly emotional, highly physical, and at times highly intellectual. Employee participants develop a high sense of team spirit and become very attached to corporate leaders who also join in the events.

And the investment in building a strong manufacturing infrastructure and furthering its research and development during the technology meltdown has paidoff handsomely for Seagate. The company is now viewed as having one of the most automated manufacturing processes in the world, and its research and development sector has transformed it from a “fast follower” to a technology leader.

In order to stay on top of its field, Seagate has continued to design, manufacture and market a wide range of new products and has given its customers a five-year warranty on all its products.

One way of widening its product line and its market is through acquisitions of corporations whose products are more or less similar in function to Seagate’s.

Last year Seagate acquired Mirra, a Sunnyvale start-up that manufactures a personal server that continuously and automatically backs up files, photos and other digital content from multiple devices. Seagate wanted to develop a box that will allow customers to access their home and small-office content from any internet-connected personal computer.

Earlier this year, Seagate announced the acquisition of Maxtor Corporation, a close rival in the manufacture and marketing of digital storage systems. The merged company retains the Seagate name and continues to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange as “STX”. Maxtor common stock has ceased to trade on the NYSE.

In the wake of the merger, Bill Watkins said Seagate is taking over Maxtor completely.

Seagate will take over Maxtor’s brand solutions and introduce Seagate expertise in the manufacture and marketing of these products. Also, there will be no layoffs among Seagate employees. Former Maxtor personnel may be hired if the needed arises.

An immediate result of the acquisitions was the winning of two awards for what are now Seagate products.

In June, LAPTOP-Mobile Solutions for Business and Life, a leading mobile technology magazine, choose Seagate’s Maxtor OneTouch III, Mini Edition storage solution for its “Ultimate Choice Award”. The product was cited for its “blend of very cool style, robust software suite, extreme ease of use, and attractive cost per gigabyte.”

In July, Seagate’s 160GB Portable Hard Drive was given a “2006 World Class Award” by PC World, one of the most widely-read computer and business magazines. The 160GB Portable Hard Drive is the industry’s mobile storage solutions with perpendicular magnetic recording, a technology that Seagate uses to deliver the highest capacity in a 2.5-inch external hard drive.

Bill Watkins, however, is worried about all the honors Seagate has been receiving.

He said the awards may introduce complacency among the personnel and in effect produce a static company.

Seagate, Bill Watkins said, should continue to evolve in order to stay on top place in the data storage industry. He said Seagate should continue to challenge the industry in manufacturing quality products. Opportunities abound particularly because of the increasing demand for quality data storage technologies worldwide.

Meanwhile, Seagate is also very much involved in the war against data theft. The company has been developing technology that bolsters storage security, and has been participating in global consortiums aimed at digital rights management.

As a member of the “Trusted Computing Group”, Seagate is working with other global organizations to create open standards for hardware-enabled security technologies to help users protect their valuable information.

Seagate was the first to market a drive-based security technology – the DB35 Series hard drive, which features drive pairing, which means the DVR and the drive cannot work without each other. It is more difficult to attack a sealed hard drive, than a system and its other components.

-Compiled by AATimes Research

Asian American Times is published monthly by Asian American Times Inc. with corporate office at 304 Turquoise Street, Milpitas California
Tel (408) 262-0117  Fax. (408) 369-1701, e-mail: editor@aatimes.com. Reproduction, modification, and/or use of all materials on this site are prohibited unless
with written permission by the Publisher. Copyright © 2006 Asian American Times. All Rights Reserved.