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Sunday, March 31, 2002

By Linda A. Dickerson

Seagate Technology LLC has begun its migration from its South Side temporary quarters to its new Strip District facility. Buncher Corp. constructed the six-story building on the Allegheny River bank, which the company now calls home, expressly to meet Seagate's needs. Seagate will occupy five of the six floors, and another tenant will rent the top floor, at least until Seagate needs to expand.

	Linda A. Dickerson is a principal in Dickerson & Mangus Ink., an issues consulting firm.

Neighbor to both the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center and the new convention center, the building that is now Seagate's home connects the old Pittsburgh with the new. The building and the business occurring within it reflect the city's metamorphosis from industrial powerhouse to a research powerhouse.

Seagate, the parent corporation to Seagate Technology LLC, is the world's largest disk drive manufacturer. Headquartered in Scotts Valley, Calif., Seagate has manufacturing facilities in more than 38 locations throughout the United States, with another 49 worldwide.

For its research operations, however, it chose Pittsburgh. "The proximity to [Carnegie Mellon University] was clearly a driving factor in our location decision," said Mark Kryder, senior vice president and director of research for Seagate Technology LLC.

After building the Data Storage System Center at CMU, Kryder was an extremely attractive candidate to spearhead Seagate's research arm. When asked why Seagate selected this area, Kryder responded, "Because I said Pittsburgh."

"I very much enjoy working with graduate students. If I stayed in Pittsburgh, I could continue to advise some grad students," he explained. While many other universities across the nation would have been delighted to add a scientist of Kryder's caliber to their faculty, CMU's preeminence in the data storage field made this region particularly desirable to Kryder and to Seagate. "There was no better university than CMU in this field," he said.

Because he believes that "university and industry interaction will continue to grow," Kryder felt that the CMU connection was essential to Seagate Technology's long-term success. He predicted: "Industry will be relying more on universities for their research functions. In many cases, it is more effective."

The paradigm governing where companies locate today is shifting dramatically. "Neither our competitors nor our suppliers nor our customers are here," Kryder said. Instead of locating where its customers or its suppliers are, Seagate Technology located where its research partner was.

Currently, the company employs approximately 140 people, many of whom hold doctoral degrees in magnetic recording technology or other related fields. These individuals hold degrees from 37 universities and represent 17 countries.

Recruiting this talent to Pittsburgh has "been no problem at all," according to Kryder. "If we can get them here to visit, we have a very good chance of hiring them," he said.

"The industry as a whole is very, very competitive," Kryder said. Despite the competitive nature of the industry, he anticipates that his company "will continue to hire people for a year or two."

"Our mission is to look four to 10 years ahead of a product," Kryder explained. In a market where changes are occurring at exponentially increasing rates, predicting the future is more difficult.

Shortened product life cycles accelerate the new product development curve. "Time to market leadership has become key," said Kryder, whose team is responsible for developing the technology that allows Seagate to introduce better and better products faster and faster.

Currently, disk drives hold a market leadership position for only above a six-month period. Since the first disk drive appeared on the market in 1956, manufacturers have substantially reduced their time-to-market. This increasing pressure to reduce the time necessary to develop new products causes companies to focus more energy and resources on the research and development component of their operations.

"Prior to 1997, [Seagate] did not try to be a technology leader," Kryder said. Then in August of 1998, the company hired him to change this. "Their investment in technology is paying off."

"The purpose of research is to try to do something that adds value," Kryder said. As Seagate Technology works zealously to advance its competitive standing, its officials also are adding value to the Pittsburgh community.

Sunday, March 31, 2002