In today’s data-driven world, enterprises face mounting challenges to scale their storage capacities while minimizing costs per terabyte and reducing resource impacts. Seagate, as a global leader in data storage solutions, is uniquely positioned to address these demands with a broad spectrum of offerings tailored to meet diverse business needs. Whether through modular products that allow customers to build their own storage systems, optimized off-the-shelf solutions, or cloud-based services for outsourced data management, Seagate ensures flexibility, scalability, and efficiency at every level.

Seagate’s commitment to innovation is evident in its comprehensive approach to storage. From terabytes delivered through devices and shuttles to petabytes with resilient and dense systems, and exabytes through the scalability of Lyve Cloud, the company empowers enterprises to choose the solution that fits them best: build and manage their data independently, collaborate with Seagate, or fully entrust their data storage needs. This tri-fold strategy provides unparalleled mobility, density, and speed to value, enabling businesses to focus on their core objectives while seamlessly managing their data.

In the META region, Seagate’s vision is brought to life through the leadership of Didem Eker, Channel Marketing Manager, who has played a pivotal role in fostering strong partnerships across key territories. While her contributions have amplified Seagate’s presence and strengthened collaborations with channel partners, the real story lies in the cutting-edge solutions Seagate brings to the table.

This interview dives into how Seagate’s storage solutions are helping enterprises tackle the challenges of rapid data growth, the company’s strategic alignment with evolving market needs, and its steadfast commitment to empowering customers with the tools to store, protect, and activate their data efficiently.

What is your personal belief about marketing?

In today’s highly competitive and interconnected digital age, businesses must transcend traditional marketing tactics to forge deeper, more authentic, and meaningful relationships with both customers and channel partners. Sustainable growth hinges on cultivating trust and collaboration to create lasting value.

To thrive in this fast-paced, digitally driven world, brands must focus on meaningful, transparent, and positive communication. This approach ensures they can establish and sustain reliable, long-term relationships with their customers. The equation is straightforward: acquiring new customers is far costlier than keeping existing ones satisfied. By delivering personalized experiences, engaging customer loyalty programs, consistent communication, and exceptional customer support, brands can elevate themselves beyond conventional marketing.

Satisfied customers are not just repeat buyers; they evolve into brand advocates, sharing their positive experiences and driving organic growth through referrals. Moreover, one of the most significant contributors to a vendor’s marketing success lies in empowering channel partnerships. Strong partnerships lead to consistent brand presence in the market, allowing businesses to remain competitive and visible.

How can businesses leverage AI and machine learning to personalize user experiences while ensuring data security and ethics?

Businesses can leverage AI and machine learning to deliver personalized user experiences by analyzing vast amounts of data to understand customer behavior, preferences, and trends. This enables tailored recommendations, predictive insights, and dynamic content delivery. To ensure data security and ethics, companies must adopt robust cybersecurity measures, comply with data protection regulations, and prioritize transparent practices. Balancing innovation with responsible data usage fosters trust and drives sustainable growth.

What is your vision for marketing in the UAE?

The UAE, with its rapidly growing economy and strategic vision, is investing heavily across various industries. This dynamic environment creates a significant appetite for corporations to innovate and adapt their marketing strategies. From technology and innovation to real estate, construction, tourism, retail, and e-commerce, the opportunities are immense.

For instance, the UAE’s smart city initiatives have unlocked vast opportunities across industries, particularly in tech solutions, data storage, and surveillance. As these investments mature, they pave the way for more innovative and integrated marketing strategies. Businesses will increasingly look beyond traditional approaches, developing comprehensive solutions to serve both enterprises and government entities.

We foresee exciting advancements, such as hyper-personalized shopping experiences and enhanced e-commerce platforms. The rapid digital transformation of the region amplifies the need for digital marketing services that can keep pace with evolving customer expectations. In this thriving ecosystem, marketing in the UAE must focus on leveraging technology and innovation to connect meaningfully with diverse audiences.

What is your belief in Seagate and its technologies?

I am deeply passionate about Seagate’s innovative leadership in mass-capacity storage, which continually pushes the boundaries of engineering. Seagate enables its customers to store and protect data in the most efficient and advanced ways possible, addressing the growing demand for high-capacity storage solutions driven by cloud expansion, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

At Seagate, everything starts with innovation. By employing cutting-edge nanoscale engineering and advanced materials science, the company delivers groundbreaking solutions. Last year, Seagate launched the Mozaic 3+ platform, designed to help businesses scale with unprecedented data growth. This platform powers the world’s most efficient hard drive storage solutions, allowing customers to reduce their total cost of ownership while enhancing operational efficiency.

With areal density at its core, Mozaic technology allows organizations to store more data without requiring additional space, energy, or natural resources. Beyond efficiency, Seagate also champions sustainability through its Circularity Program, a pioneering effort to minimize electronic waste and promote sustainable consumption. This program extends the lifecycle of hard drives and significantly reduces carbon emissions, aligning with Seagate’s commitment to environmental responsibility. Seagate’s approach demonstrates a remarkable balance between innovation, efficiency, and sustainability, reflecting its dedication to creating a better future for data management and the planet.

Could you tell us about SkyHawk technology, how it drives surveillance and AI systems?

SkyHawk drives enhance surveillance and AI systems by offering high capacity, optimized firmware, and a workload rating suitable for 24×7 operations. They support up to 64 HD cameras and 32 AI streams, ensuring reliable video streaming and advanced AI analysis. With features like SkyHawk Health Management, they monitor drive health, prevent data loss, and reduce maintenance costs, providing integrators with better total cost of ownership and increased customer satisfaction.

Tell us about Mozaic 3+ platform and how that revolutionizes storage?

The Mozaic 3+ platform, powering Seagate’s Exos product family, revolutionizes hyperscale cloud storage with industry-leading capacity, including Exos 30TB+ products. It doubles storage capacity compared to conventional 16TB drives, optimizing data storage within the same footprint. Prioritizing sustainability, it improves power consumption per terabyte by 40% and reduces embodied carbon by 55%, addressing efficiency and environmental challenges simultaneously.

What are your predictions for Seagate in the UAE market?

The UAE’s dynamic economy and strategic geographic position offer exceptional opportunities for growth. With rapid digital transformation and increasing demand for data storage, Seagate is uniquely positioned to leverage its strengths in the surveillance industry and beyond.

Seagate’s advanced integrated security solutions cater to the region’s expanding need for scalable and reliable data storage, particularly for businesses and government entities managing explosive data growth. Surveillance remains a key area of strength, and we see significant potential to expand our enterprise portfolio by strengthening relationships with key accounts and demonstrating the value of our solutions.

To capture this opportunity, Seagate will maintain a focused marketing strategy, emphasizing VIA (Video, Imaging, and Analytics) solutions while penetrating enterprise markets with high-capacity messaging. By addressing the specific needs of the UAE market, Seagate aims to remain a trusted partner, empowering organizations with cutting-edge storage solutions that drive growth and innovation.

Stephen Liang, Chief Technology Officer, and EVP Infrastructure & Solutions, Vertiv

With the rapid expansion of data center investments across the Middle East, fuelled by the region’s abundant and affordable power resources, Technology Integrator spoke with Stephen Liang, Vertiv’s CTO, to explore the company’s latest innovations in cooling and power solutions. These advancements are designed to meet the demands of high-density data centers while prioritizing energy efficiency, positioning Vertiv at the forefront of data center innovation and infrastructure development in the region.

He also delved into Vertiv’s strategic collaborations with industry giants like NVIDIA and other leading chipmakers, which are instrumental in ensuring data centers are future-ready for the growing demands of AI applications. Liang emphasized how Vertiv’s global R&D network drives innovation, enabling the company to develop tailored solutions that address the unique needs of Middle Eastern markets.

As the Chief Technology Officer, could you share insights into how you’re utilizing AI within your organization?

AI is both a dynamic frontier and an evolution of established methodologies. In many respects, it’s a modern enhancement of time-tested techniques. For instance, we’ve long used large-scale data models for data mining and predictive maintenance and leveraged sophisticated machine learning algorithms to support our design processes and simulations, especially for analyzing power and cooling flows. Today, AI amplifies these capabilities, accelerating the precision, speed, and depth of learning and analysis. Looking forward, we’re pushing the envelope in assisted programming and design, exploring AI’s potential to shape Vertiv’s future innovations.

At its core, AI unifies a suite of advanced technologies under one framework, driven by high-performance computing that enables significantly faster, more complex task execution. Where we once relied on human productivity alone, we now have computers driving transformations at an unprecedented scale, redefining workflows and drastically shortening innovation cycles. While human capabilities eventually plateau, AI empowers our teams to reach new productivity heights, creating products and solutions that closely align with customer needs. This is AI’s transformational power in action.

How is Vertiv leveraging its presence in the Middle East and its partnerships with hyperscalers and chip manufacturers to address the growing demands on data centers driven by AI advancements?

When engaging with data center operators worldwide, one of their most pressing challenges is ensuring uninterrupted and reliable power. The Middle East, with its robust, cost-efficient power sources, has become a strategic hub for data center growth, particularly those focused on AI applications. Vertiv is well-positioned to support this expansion, with deep roots in the region, including a state-of-the-art production facility in Ras Al-Khaimah, and longstanding regional partnerships that enable us to support virtually any data center project.

Additionally, our strategic collaborations with hyperscalers and major chipmakers such as NVIDIA place us at the forefront of data center evolution. As AI technology advances and the demand for data centers intensifies, we’re helping client’s infrastructures be future-ready. Today, data center planning requires a proactive, visionary approach; after years of plateauing demand, AI has reignited the industry, driving a resurgence in infrastructure innovation.

By collaborating with leading technology providers and data center operators, Vertiv ensures rapid deployment of cutting-edge technologies with resilient, scalable infrastructure. We’re laying the foundation for the next wave of AI-driven advancements and solidifying the region’s place in this transformative landscape.

How has Vertiv’s long-standing partnership with NVIDIA, especially in AI research, shaped its approach to supporting cutting-edge technology deployment?

Our partnership with NVIDIA has been pivotal, particularly in advancing critical digital infrastructure to accelerate AI adoption.  Through power and cooling initiatives with NVIDIA, Vertiv has provided extensive expertise to show our ability to support global deployments at scale while educating and empowering the wider AI ecosystem.

Our unique blend of technical depth and global presence has established Vertiv as a trusted partner to industry giants who count on us for seamless, efficient deployment of their most advanced technologies.

How do you balance the increasing demand for computing power with the need for energy efficiency?

AI is often labelled as “energy-intensive,” but it’s more accurate to view it as a technology that enables higher productivity per kilowatt. Measured in Floating Point Operations Per Second (FLOPS) or Million Instructions Per Second (MIPS), today’s computers achieve exponentially higher outputs for the same energy input. While modern Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) indeed draw more power, their processing capabilities have advanced even faster, delivering greater efficiency in computational tasks.

Traditionally, Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) has gauged efficiency by comparing power usage in compute tasks with total facility power. But PUE alone doesn’t fully capture the extraordinary gains in processing power achieved per energy unit. If we’d limited ourselves to Central Processing Unit (CPU) level performance, we’d save energy, but at the cost of breakthrough advancements in fields like medicine, scientific research, and sustainable energy solutions.

The tech industry is innovating vigorously for sustainability. UPS systems, which were once only 80% efficient, now achieve up to 98% or higher, while some cooling systems’ PUE has improved from 3-4 to approximately 1.2. This evolution underscores our commitment to balancing demand with sustainable infrastructure, driving positive impact even as we scale for a data-driven future.

How is Vertiv adapting its power and cooling solutions to meet the growing demand for higher power densities in data centers, especially with the integration of AI technologies, and what role do renewable energy sources play in this evolution?

Vertiv is actively partnering with leading tech developers to craft advanced cooling and power solutions that accommodate surging power densities in data centers. Just a few years ago, most data centers operated at about 10 kilowatts per cabinet. Today, some AI-focused hardware demands up to 40 kilowatts, and projections now reach from 80 to 150 kilowatts per rack. This rapid rise in power density requires pioneering approaches to power management and cooling, and Vertiv is spearheading this evolution from the grid down to the chip level.

AI workloads create fluctuating power demands that can impact grid stability. To address this, Vertiv collaborates with chip manufacturers and hyperscalers to develop technologies that stabilize power requirements while helping to maintain grid reliability. Our adaptive energy storage systems smooth out power fluctuations and help to seamlessly integrate renewables like wind and solar into the grid, promoting more efficient data center operations.

With a flexible, globally tailored approach to cooling and power, Vertiv ensures mission-critical infrastructure that supports a wide array of high-performance applications globally. This combination of advanced technology and regional customization positions Vertiv as a leader in future-ready data center solutions.

6. How is Vertiv empowering its global R&D network and partnerships to drive innovation in data center technology?

It’s an incredibly exciting era for Vertiv and the data center industry. Having witnessed several transformative waves, I believe we’re on the cusp of another pivotal shift. Vertiv’s commitment to cutting-edge R&D has never been stronger, with strategic partnerships at an all-time high positioning us alongside industry trailblazers. Major tech companies now look to Vertiv to create the future of data centers, engaging with top research institutions to advance capabilities at the frontier of the industry.

Vertiv’s extensive, strategically positioned R&D network allows us to swiftly adapt to evolving market needs, delivering region-specific solutions that set global standards. Through this expansive innovation ecosystem, we’re advancing the future of data centers and meeting the complex demands of the AI era with resilience and ingenuity.

Exclusive Interview with Dimitris Manikis, President EMEA at Wyndham Hotels and Resorts

Dimitris Manikis, the President of EMEA at Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, is a seasoned leader in the hospitality industry with a passion for growth, team development, and the democratization of travel. With over two decades of experience, Dimitris has built a reputation for successfully navigating diverse markets and cultivating a global network of talent. Under his leadership, Wyndham continues to expand its footprint across the EMEA region, embracing both luxury and accessible travel solutions. In this exclusive interview, Dimitris shares insights from his journey, highlights the power of people in the hospitality sector, and discusses Wyndham’s commitment to providing travel opportunities for all. He also offers a glimpse into the company’s culture, the importance of employee satisfaction, and how Wyndham is poised for continued success in the rapidly evolving hospitality landscape.

How was your experience at the Future Hospitality Summit?

It was incredible. According to the organizers, it was the biggest show ever. The atmosphere was vibrant, with great colleagues and an abundance of positive energy surrounding the development in the region—and not just the region, but the hospitality industry as a whole. Events like this left everyone feeling inspired and enthusiastic about the future of our industry.

Wyndham has a presence all over the globe. What sets it apart in the EMEA region that you handle?

I would say it’s the people. Everyone in the hospitality industry will tell you that while many brands have growth plans and perform well in their respective markets, it’s the people that make the real difference. I’m fortunate to work with an amazing and diverse team. Within Wyndham Corporate, we have more than 15 to 18 nationalities represented across EMEA. It’s inspiring to see this blend of cultures coming together to deliver exceptional hospitality. It’s not just about what sets Wyndham apart; it’s about what makes the hospitality industry so special. This year, 1.5 billion people are expected to travel, and we are the “industry of happiness.” No matter the reason for travel, there’s always someone who genuinely cares about providing the right service and making people feel at home. That’s what excites me every day—the people.

If you want your customers to be happy, it’s important to make your employees happy. What is Wyndham doing to achieve that?

Wyndham is globally recognized as one of the best places to work. As Jeff Bezos once said, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” In every survey we’ve conducted, our team members have consistently shared that Wyndham is a wonderful place to work. At the heart of our culture is our “Count on Me” philosophy. It’s about being able to rely on one another, regardless of hierarchy, location, or title. This sense of teamwork and mutual support is something that’s deeply ingrained in Wyndham’s culture worldwide. I’m incredibly proud to lead such a diverse and committed team.

Wyndham caters to all kinds of customers—from luxury to those seeking a small staycation. Is this something that makes Wyndham unique?

It doesn’t necessarily make us unique because many other brands also cater to a wide range of travelers. However, what sets Wyndham apart is our core philosophy: we make travel possible for all. We believe in the democratization of travel. Travel is one of life’s most beautiful experiences, and we’re committed to providing opportunities for millions of people to stay with us. Whether it’s a Wyndham Super 8 in the economy segment or a Wyndham Grand in the luxury segment, we have a brand for every type of traveler. While others may offer similar models, our mission to make travel accessible to everyone is what drives us every day.

As a visionary leader with extensive hospitality experience, what advice would you like to share?

It may sound simple, but I believe in hard work. I enjoy reading biographies of great individuals who’ve achieved significant milestones in their lives, and the one common denominator among them is hard work. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Stay true to your values and keep your personal compass with you at all times—not just a moral compass, but one that reflects who you are as a human being. What do you stand for? What values were you raised with? These should guide you every day. If you stay true to your principles, control what you can, and put in consistent effort, success will follow. Work hard, stay grounded, and success will come in its own time.