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Danyll Wills

Mention the name Seagate and hard disks spring to mind.

 Recently though, Seagate has begun to branch out into other areas, including software.

  Seagate's software division was formed in January. Since then, Seagate has been snatching up software companies. In February, Seagate bought Arcada Software, a back-up management software company. Arcada had merged with Palindrome, another software company Seagate acquired when it merged with Conner Peripherals.

  On a recent trip to Hong Kong, Ken Cooper, vice-president and managing director of Seagate Software said Seagate was serious about the software business.

  'We want to be a billion-dollar software company by 1999,' he said.

  He said Seagate would go after special markets, particularly those that specialised in back-up and recovery. 'The goal is to have niche markets,' he said.

  Mr Cooper said the company was committed to Asia, which would only grow stronger.

   Seagate was a large employer in the region, with 30,000 staff in Thailand, 15,000 in Singapore and 10,000 in Malaysia, he said.

  One of the big problems in Asia was getting people to understand the importance of back-up, he said.

   'The key to the software and tape-drive markets is education,' he said.

  In the business area, Mr Cooper said he saw banks leading the way.

  'Banks are moving away from mainframe to client/server,' he said. This, ultimately, is good for Seagate because their software runs on nearly all client/server platforms, including Unix, Novell, Microsoft Windows NT, Windows 95 and DOS.

  For the moment Mr Cooper said he saw Thailand as the country with the biggest market potential in Asia, although the Philippines was catching up fast.

  Even Vietnam was slowly moving into the network market.

  As for the big subject of the day - the network computer (NC) - Mr Cooper said it was still early days.

 Nevertheless, the NC will depend on a client/server environment to succeed and that meant Seagate Software could be involved, he said.

  In many ways, Seagate Software gets the best of both worlds: it can work with Microsoft in creating back-up strategies that will succeed under Windows environments and do the same thing for Unix.



Seagate makes hard drive into software