Seagate and Baidu Sign Strategic Cooperation Agreement for Big Data Analysis and Advanced Storage Implementation

Translated Directly from Chinese Version of Press Release

BEIJING, CHINA — Seagate Technology plc (NASDAQ: STX), a world leader in storage solutions, today announced the signing of a strategic cooperation agreement with Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU), the leading Chinese language internet search provider and artificial intelligence technology company, covering the fields of information technology, big data analysis and advanced storage system development and implementation.

The pact renews an existing agreement between the two firms signed in September 2014, under which both parties would regard each other as their preferred strategic partner, investing their respective superior resources, carrying out experiments in products, solutions and services, and jointly getting involved in diverse technological innovation research.

The cooperation between the two parties builds on this, with Seagate providing double the amount of technical cooperation, and closer links to Baidu for its business needs, leading the two parties to keep jointly developing customized products and satisfying their fast–growing business needs by introducing new products and technologies into Baidu. In addition, the supply chain model for both companies will be further optimized and upgraded to award more dividends for each side. The cooperation further empowers Seagate and Baidu to lead the development of Internet, cloud computing and big data domestically and globally.

It is predicted by International Data Corporation (IDC) that by 2025, the global data sphere will grow to 163 zettabytes (ZB), which is 10 times the 16.1ZB data generated in 2016. By then, nearly 20 percent of the data in the global data sphere will be critical to our daily lives and nearly 10 percent of that will be hypercritical. This data will unlock unique user experiences and a new world of business opportunities. How to effectively store and make use of this massive data resource therefore becomes critical. The cooperation between Seagate and Baidu is dedicated to optimizing the customer experience.

Baidu has applied Seagate enterprise drives for its proprietary data center and public cloud platform at the 1st stage of their cooperation. Due to their close links and cooperation, Seagate won the “Baidu Data Center 2016 Outstanding Partner Award” at the Baidu AI Developer Conference, and was the only provider who won this award among three major components (CPU, memory, hard disk) providers. With the principle of opening-up cooperation and mutual benefits, Seagate and Baidu profoundly cooperate in data center and cloud computing, successfully making use of development strategies and complementary advantages, and significantly improving their status in their respective industries, achieving the effect of "1+1>2".

“We’ve been placing great emphasis on the mutual development and close cooperation with Baidu,” said BS Teh, senior vice president of global sales and sales operations at Seagate Technology. “As one of our most important strategic partners, Baidu will continue to get full support from Seagate, and we will further cooperate at a deeper level to jointly develop customized high-performance products to meet Baidu’s business needs.”

“As the top AI technology enterprise with leading data center technology worldwide, Baidu attaches great importance to technology and welcomes innovation and solutions with open arms.” said Mr. Zhang Yaqin, President of Baidu. “Baidu and Seagate have maintained close relations since 2014, and established close technological cooperation in the field of SMR, cloud storage and Helium hard disk drives, this contributes to the reduction of storage cost and improvement of storage quality, as well as the enhanced competitiveness for Baidu. In the future, we also look forward to deepening our cooperation with Seagate in order to solve various storage challenges in the era of big data, improving storage quality, efficiency and reliability, providing stronger support to the development of both companies as well.”

Cloud computing and big data are paradigm-shifting innovation in the field of information technology, providing fresh impetus for global industrial upgrading and economic transition, dramatically changing the production mode and people’s lifestyle. The comprehensive cooperation between Seagate and Baidu builds up a new collaborative model involved in research, development and application, promoting a healthy and rapid development of the data ecosystem.

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© 2017 Seagate Technology LLC. All rights reserved. Seagate, Seagate Technology, and the Spiral logo are registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. When referring to drive capacity, one gigabyte, or GB, equals one billion bytes and one terabyte, or TB, equals one trillion bytes. Your computer’s operating system may use a different standard of measurement and report a lower capacity. In addition, some of the listed capacity is used for formatting and other functions, and thus will not be available for data storage.