![]() ![]() LaCie will bring to Seagate its Wuala consumer-focused cloud storage business, which competes with similar offerings from Carbonite and EMC's Mozy, both of which have maintained a strong consumer focus in the last couple of years while gradually building their small business cloud storage business. The service stores files in data centres that are provided by Wuala in multiple European countries (France, Germany, Switzerland). It is now part of LaCie, which is in turn owned by Seagate Technology. Seagate over time will also look at how to adjust the branding of its LaCie and Seagate consumer storage products, he said. Wuala / wl / was a secure online file storage, file synchronization, versioning and backup service originally developed and run by Caleido Inc. Once the acquisition closes late this year, Seagate plans call for Philippe Spruch, LaCie's chairman and CEO, to join Seagate and lead the company's consumer storage business, Pimentel said. "Also, walk into any Apple store and LaCie is there." ![]() "It's successful in many distribution channels where Seagate has been less successful, including channel in Europe and Japan," he said. LaCie also brings success in its multi-channel strategy, including consumer channels and a small business-to-business channel, Pimentel said. The updated OS offers a single user interface for local and cloud storage creating a hybrid cloud via Wuala (the cloud provider with which LaCie merged a few years back). "LaCie, because of its focus on design and ease of use, has established a loyal customer base, which allows them to charge a premium price," he said. LaCie utilizes their own LaCie NAS OS3 in this model, diverging from the Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials in the 5big Office + NAS. The Wuala software installed quickly and easily, and the Wuala storage appeared immediately as a local drive and for the most part behaved like one. This is significantly more than most online storage services provide with a free account. Buyers get 10GB from Wuala, a LaCie subsidiary. Seagate also saw the success LaCie had with driving value in the consumer storage business, which is usually more characterized as a cost-driven business, Pimentel said. The online storage option is a happier story. ![]() Luzius Meisser, Co-Founder of Caleido said, 'Wuala is an exciting technology that builds its reliable and secure cloud storage by harnessing idle resources.' Wuala assembles. "Over the course of the last few years, as we were looking at building our consumer storage business, we had more talks with LaCie about strategies and vision," Pimentel said. Today, LaCie announced a merger with Caleido AG, the creators of the innovative online storage service, Wuala. Rocky Pimentel, Seagate's chief sales and marketing officer, said the decision to acquire LaCie stemmed from several factors, not the least of which was a long-term relationship between the two companies in which Seagate was a major supplier of hard drives to LaCie. Seagate also has a consumer storage business based on its 2006 acquisition of Maxtor, in addition to having its EVault SMB cloud storage, which it gained in its late 2006 acquisition of EVault. It also has a large presence in the Apple-related storage business. LaCie manufactures and sells a wide range of consumer and small business storage products including USB hard drives and other storage devices, networked storage, RAID appliances and optical devices, as well as the Wuala cloud storage service. The deal values LaCie at about $186 million. To find out more about Wuala, head to The CooKey and WhizKey are available for US$19.99 for 4GB, $29.99 for 8GB, $54.99 for 16GB and $99.99 for 32GB.Seagate on Wednesday said it has an agreement to acquire almost 65 percent of the outstanding shares of Paris, France-based LaCie. If you're capable of putting two and two together, you'll have realized that this means Wuala is housing data on home computers around the world - but that doesn't mean your data isn't safe - it's encrypted using 128-bit AES encryption, and stored redundantly in several locations to speed up transfers. If that doesn't get you, the extra Wuala storage space certainly should. While this portable hard drive isn't attention grabbing like the Starck Mobile, it provides decent performance at a surprisingly affordable price. The USB keys are available in sizes from 4GB to 32GB, and all include 4GB of online storage with LaCie's Wuala service.Īdditional online storage can be purchased, starting at US$25/year for 10GB, but where things get interesting is that if your computer is turned on and connected to the internet for more than four hours a day, you can trade any unused local storage for the same amount of online storage. In our tests, the LaCie Rikiki portable hard drive performed capably when dealing with both small and large files. LaCie has unveiled the CooKey and WhizKey, two new USB keys inspired by the award-winning iamaKey, both featuring the water- and scratch-resistant gold SIP connectors of their inspiration.
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