Strategic Partner Relationship Between Seagate and Chinese Tencent

Seagate Technology plc and Tencent Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd, a Chinese Internet services company, signed a strategic partnership Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for cooperation in the field of information technology.

Tencent will regard Seagate as a key supplier of storage solutions, and Seagate will treat Tencent as a strategic partner and set up a special service team for Tencent. Also, within the duration of the MOU, both companies will carry out an all-round and in-depth cooperation covering product, technology, and jointly impel the development of the market.

As one of Chinese providers of Internet value-added services, Tencent is devoted to improving the quality of human life through Internet service. With a long history of innovation and technology leadership, Tencent has become one of the top three Internet companies in China.

“Tencent has been providing a variety of innovative services since its inception,” said Tom Bie, GM of system department, Tencent. “The extreme volume of data produced by instant messaging, online games, financial services and cloud services is directly correlated with these applications. The joint cooperation between Seagate and Tencent is an inevitable corollary of our business development. We look forward to a dramatic development of our products, services, and market, not only within China, but also in the international arena through this all-round deep collaboration.“

The product and technology cooperation between the two companies will cover Seagate’s line of enterprise solutions including mission critical HDD drives, near line HDDs, cloud drives, archive drives and SSDs. In order to consolidate the technical leadership of both sides, the two firms will set up joint projects during their cooperation, including jointly testing new drives, researching and developing new storage technologies and products, high capacity and HDDs, drive health management and conducting HDD application analysis, tailor-made to specific Tencent businesses. They will also communicate on new products and technologies on a regular basis to realize targeted product development and optimization, and expand market share based on new market trends.

IDC forecasts in its white paper Data Age 2025 that by 2025 the global datasphere will grow to 163ZB. That total is ten times the quantity of data generated in 2016. All this data will unlock unique user experiences and a new world of business opportunities.

This huge amount of total data and the rapid growth of real time information creates a great demand for storage and management, as well as providing a promising new market for both customer facing and background enterprises.

“With the continuous development of digitalization, data will exert a huge positive influence on human society. New data is offering enterprises more effective operational capabilities, and changing every aspect of people’s lives,” said BS Teh, SVP of global sales and sales operations, Seagate. “Today, we take great pleasure in setting up a strategic partner relationship with Tencent. The two parties will collaborate with each other, constantly developing and optimizing storage solutions for Tencent specific applications so as to provide users with a better data application experience. We hope that the customized service and joint R&D activities covering various storage solutions can help Tencent perfect their data services, and at the same time, promote Seagate’s delivery capabilities from technology to service.“