Did you know Seagate CEO Steve Luczo has a tattoo on his left ring finger? That's one fact one can learn from a recent Forbes interview, with other topics including the aftermath of the Thailand floods, flash memory and opportunities in the cloud...
Following the Thailand floodings, Luczo says the industry is rebuilding "for the future," and predicts the market will soon reach pre-flood levels (170-180 million units monthly)-- even if Luczo insists the industry is not about units ("the obsession about units is ridiculous") but storage capacity.
Petabytes, in other words.
Commenting on the recent Western Digital purchase of Hitachi GST, Luczo says WD did it "to get the enterprise business," a segment Hitachi is strong at.
When it comes to flash memory, Luczo says it "is a complementary technology, it’s not a competitive technology," and the future will mostly lead to hybrid drives as a compromise between performance, capacity and pricing.
Meanwhile tablets might be cannibalising laptop sales, but are also driving storage sales "elsewhere."
"So whatever the architecture is, pads, phones, notebooks, ultrabooks, real notebooks, PCs, servers, clouds, one year, a zettabyte – that’s all going to be on rotating mass storage," Luczo continues.
What does the rise of the cloud mean for storage? According to Luczo-- more business, seeing how "...all the cloud is is a disk drive with some bandwidth." He even speculates a technology titan (IBM, EMC, or HP) might be thinking of buying Seagate or WD.
Seagate might also consider offering online storage with its drives-- but only if it manages to build the required architecture cheaply itself.
Finally, a couple of facts on Luczo-- we already mentioned he has a tattoo on his left ring finger (his wife's name, Agatha), but he also wears a red string around his wrist as "a Buddhist thing" meaning long life.