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Technology Stocks : Seagate Technology -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: CPAMarty who wrote (5656)	9/12/1998 2:32:00 PM
From: DJBEINO	Respond to of 7841

Q&A with Steve Luczo -- Seagate's Chief Promises Detour In Company's Long, Hard Drive Karen Franse Seagate Technology Inc. has been a company in flux. But, despite some rough financial quarters last year and the recent ousting of its founder, Al Shugart, the company's incumbent chief executive Steve Luczo told distribution editor Karen Franse that Seagate is headed in the right direction. On Seagate's improving performance: Organizationally, we've made many people changes and lots of process changes. But from a customer perspective, the biggest focus has really been on the operating side to improve product quality and on factory efficiencies to increase our productivity and lower our costs. Luczo's take on critical time-to-market issues: At the high end last year, we really fell off the pace with our Barracuda 9-GB/18-GB [drives]. We were quite late to market, which hurt us in the channel as well as with OEMs. We've come a long way in recovering our leadership there. We're the clear leader with the Cheetah, which is our 10,000-rpm platform. And we're the clear leader with Fibre Channel, which is starting to get a lot more market acceptance. On achieving companywide efficiencies: [We've] consolidated our design centers, [started] outsourcing [some components] technology and gone to a common materials management [system] to leverage our materials purchases and derive more commonality. We've implemented core teams across all the product lines, basically taking a cross-functional team and dedicating it full time to a particular program. Seagate wasn't structured like that before, and we think it cost us a fair amount in time-to-market. Comparing storage to client-server opportunities in the channel: The great thing about client-server computing is its scalability. And scalability doesn't just imply technical scalability. It implies scalability in delivery. The great thing about client-server is I can scale a business that delivers technology [to be] a function of whatever market I'm trying to address. But storage doesn't scale very well today. Technically, we're solving many of [those] problems. Because storage is getting more scalable, there's an opportunity [to see] scalable storage subsystems through the channel. As a result, there's going to be a huge opportunity [for VARs]. techweb.com