Seagate Wins 2009 Everything Channel Five-Star Award For Partner Program Excellence

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif. - Seagate (NASDAQ:STX) today announced that the Seagate Partner Program, designed to help Seagate’s channel partners leverage the company’s industry leadership, technology innovation and product reliability to grow their businesses, has been recognized by Everything Channel as one of North America’s top information-technology (IT) partner programs. Seagate was the only hard drive maker to win this recognition.

The Seagate Partner Program earned the Five-Star certification in the highly competitive large-volume category – companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue – in Everything Channel’s 15th Annual 2009 Partner Program Guide (PPG). Partner programs were evaluated in six areas: sales support, marketing support, partner profitability, channel operations, communications and partner recruitment.

Other Five-Star winners in the large-volume category include Microsoft, HP, Cisco, Oracle and AutoDesk. A list of PPG winners will appear in the March 30 issue of CRN magazine, the channel industry’s leading publication, and online at www.channelweb.com, the world’s largest channel industry portal.

The Seagate Partner Program (SPP) is designed specifically for resellers, system builders, system integrators and solution providers that have aligned their solutions and customers with the Seagate product portfolio. SPP members benefit from support, training resources, marketing tools and incentives that can help them improve service, solve business problems, lower costs, increase profits, compete more effectively, and improve their hardware and service delivery infrastructure.

“The prestigious Five-Star honor points to Seagate’s steadfast commitment to our channel partners’ success,” said John Vossoughi, vice president of Americas Sales and Marketing at Seagate. “The Seagate Partner Program, now in its tenth year, continues to evolve to meet the needs of our channel community — we continue to reach out to our partners to make the Seagate Partner Program an essential part of their businesses.”

Research for the 2009 Everything Channel Partner Program Guide and the Everything Channel Five-Star Program was conducted by Everything Channel’s Institute for Partner Education & Development (IPED). IPED analyzed 130 vendor programs rating vendors’ responses to nearly 60 in-depth questions about their partner programs.

“Now more than ever, the quality of a vendor’s partner program determines how profitable its partners will be,” said Robert C. DeMarzo, senior vice president and editorial director, Everything Channel. “So for their commitment to their partners, and their efforts to build quality programs, we congratulate this year’s Five-Star Partner Program Guide winners for helping to drive greater revenue in the channel.”

Everything Channel
Everything Channel is the one-stop shop for accessing, enabling, managing and accelerating technology sales channels. From branding and recruiting to marketing and sales, Everything Channel offers technology marketers the unmatched breadth and depth of global brands and market intelligence combined with unparalleled audience loyalty and credibility serving all technology sales channels through an extensive database. Everything Channel provides innovative sales and marketing solutions to arm the sellers of technology with the resources they need to achieve measurable and significant results. Learn more at www.everythingchannel.com and www.channelweb.com.