Seagate Opens New Technology Innovation Lab

Lyve Data Labs to enable enterprises across industries to fast-track data transformation

Nestled at the foot of the Rocky Mountains in Seagate’s award-winning design center at Longmont, Colorado, an innovation lab is now bustling with partner activity as company leaders put their heads together to solve problems—the problems they face in their own business operations and those they need to address for their customers in the next generation of products. These are not the technology leaders of yesterday. They come from diverse industries—telco, automotive, video surveillance, agriculture—because the entire world is data-driven now. The need for technology solutions does not end with traditional technology companies. Progressive and eager to innovate, companies from all kinds of sectors are partnering with Seagate to develop products and solutions for problems we have today… and those we might not even know we have yet.

Seagate developed Lyve Data Labs because we believe in eliminating any barriers to innovation. We are better together.

Lyve Data Labs introduces a collaborative workspace with direct access to solutions, playbooks, and technical experts so our partners can focus on what they do best while not reinventing the data management wheel. By breaking down technical and time barriers to product conceptualization, development, and adoption, the technology that come out of the labs will spur the next generation of IT infrastructure: IT 4.0.

What is IT 4.0?

There is a fundamental change afoot that will affect every economic and leisure activity in our daily lives. From playing board games and commuting to even writing software, standard ways of doing things are being disrupted—that is, innovations are challenging and changing the established market paradigms and creating new value networks. There are two major forces driving this shift: Digital information that acts as the rocket fuel for the change and artificial intelligence (AI) as the rocket ship that extracts value from data.

Our economic history has seen several upheavals before, and use of software and automation is not new. So what’s different? One, there is an almost endless supply of data that is actionable. Two, today’s tremendous computing capability is no longer limited to large centralized data centers and can be moved closer to sources of data. The sheer volume of data created at the endpoints shifts the data gravity to the edge of the network and draws the computing power and applications closer to deliver decisions in real time.

Considering this change, companies across various industries grapple with evolving to IT 4.0 while intelligently managing their own operations—all while introducing new products and solutions to a consumer market with a voracious appetite for everything shiny and new. There’s the hand-held phone that we want to replace every year with something that has more features; the app-driven, connected vehicle; and the smart home devices that we want to function ever more … well, smartly. Companies need to harness technology at mind-boggling speed and they need to focus on the products that meet their customers’ demands, not on the data management underpinnings that make the product functionality possible.

Overcome roadblocks to integrate and realize the value of new technologies

But getting from point A to point B is not as easy as it may sound. There are technical roadblocks to integrating new technologies into a product stack or into an enterprise factory. Waiting down-stream for traditional IT providers to introduce new technology to market means a delay in recognizing the value of the new technology. And pre-built data solutions that easily integrate with their existing technology stack and products lines are scarce.

The old way of do-it-yourself and even the somewhat more advanced practice of assembling pieces and parts from different technology providers are no longer viable. Product stacks are complex and components need to be optimized to work together. Enterprising companies know they should identify partners who have already put the R&D into technology that will enable their factories and/or product solutions. They can do this by “compressing the stack”—working directly with original innovators and aligning with partners who have vertical testing and validation expertise.

Lyve Data Labs: solving the challenges of IT 4.0

With Lyve, we open our doors to other industry leaders. What if they could leverage our tools, experience, and support to solve complex data challenges at scale? The answer is that a simple model creates impactful outcomes: businesses bring their domain, industry expertise, and data processing knowledge, while we bring our data security, management, and activation prowess. Together, we work in the open ecosystem to quickly build and deploy comprehensive solutions today’s enterprise operations need, and those that today’s consumer expects.

The democratized approach allows enterprise businesses to adopt new technology right from the source, thus eliminating the path dependence in which eager enterprises wait for new technology to be introduced in another company’s product lines before they can deploy it in their own products and environments.

The engineers, market analysts, and product leaders who built Lyve Data Labs worked from the fundamental conviction that people, whether they’re manufacturing facility head or an end-user of their products, expect a unified data solution. —In other words, they don’t have to know or understand the complex technical underpinnings of the system; they simply want to use it and benefit from it. In order for this to be possible, the underlying technology needs to promote this data flow.

At Seagate, a unified data experience is the meat of every recipe. It’s where we start every time. With Lyve we enable our partners to deliver this excellence by giving them direct access to the advanced tools that are too cost-, resource-, and time-prohibitive for them to develop on their own.

What’s really in it for our Lyve Data Labs partners?

An efficient supply chain, extensive testing and validation processes, and the experience of real use cases within various vertical industries will mean companies can take products or internal stacks from conception to launch much faster. Their competitive advantage will see a significant boost as they leverage our knowledge base of libraries and blueprints, refer to a library of solutions by use case, and use Seagate storage components already optimized for speed and performance. They’ll deliver the all-in-one solutions their customer demand having created better products with end-to-end vertical integration, open-source software, and modular, building blocks.

Ready to learn, engage, and build with Seagate? Visit Lyve Data Labs.