Seagate Technology Inc doesn’t buy the notion that the disk business is heading into overcapacity again – and even if it is, it intends to ride the tiger by outselling its rivals. It is investing between $100m and $200m more in its media and substrate manufacturing operations in the US and Asia over the next three years to underscore its commitment to a vertically-integrated manufacturing and take full advantage of complementary technical capabilities in heads, media, motors and semiconductors. Construction of a new 163,000 square-foot highly-automated platter manufacturing facility in Singapore is already under way, with clean rooms, conveyors and an automated materials handling system. It is also investing in existing media and substrate operations in Fremont and Anaheim, California, to increase production capability for aluminium substrates and the increasingly fashionable and more durable lightweight glass substrates used in drives for laptop computers. The company currently buys in most of its platters. Separately, Seagate signed definitive agreement to buy Creative Interaction Technologies Inc for an undisclosed cash sum, which will cost it a one-time $6m against its fourth quarter figures. Chapel Hill, North Carolina-based Creative Interaction designed AshWin, a batch scheduler for heterogeneous client-server, and the acquisition is part of the Scotts Valley company’s strategy to build a software business offering a comprehensive set of network, storage and information management products to commercial enterprise customers using client-server systems. Its Network Computing unit just launched the LANAlert Agent for Windows NT Server, intelligent agent network management technology integrating Windows NT and NetWare, so users can manage NT and NetWare servers from the same consoles, at $800 per server with 100 server agents at $49,500, this quarter.
