Seagate® Technology plc (NASDAQ: STX), a world leader in data storage and management solutions, today officially opens its Lyve™ Labs Israel.
Lyve Labs’ mission is to form partnerships with businesses in order to enable innovations by providing simple, secure, and efficient ways to work with exabytes of data. The initiative empowers the seamless movement of data, optimizing its business value both in flight and at rest.
“The reason Seagate created Lyve Labs is because we understand that innovation cannot happen in silos,” said Seagate’s CEO Dr. Dave Mosley. “It’s a work of collaboration. The innovators at Lyve Labs are indebted to others. In turn—drawing on over 40 years of Seagate’s research and development—we want to help enable innovations that use data for the good of humanity.”
Israel is a vibrant hub of datasphere innovation, with the largest number of startups per capita in the world and with more than 10% of the labor force employed in the high-tech industry. Prior to the lab’s opening today, Dr. Mosley will address an audience of investors and entrepreneurs at OurCrowd—the largest global investor summit in Israel—as one of its key speakers. The theme for the 2020 OurCrowd is “Startups: Going Beyond,” which aligns with Seagate’s vision of startup technologies pushing the innovation limits. The Lyve Labs center in Tel Aviv has already attracted a number of startups looking for solutions that harness data for the good of humanity. Partnerships tackling data challenges are already in progress. Today’s opening formalizes these relationships.
“We want to both help the ecosystem and learn from it,” said Erez Baum, head of Lyve Labs Israel. “Lyve Labs is as much a two-way learning platform as a co-creation center. The goal is to learn from our partners’ data challenges and develop solutions in collaboration with them to help them be more competitive in this data-driven economy.”
The companies partnering with Lyve Labs Israel take on data challenges as relevant as survival during an earthquake. “Our solution is currently based on the cloud, but we need to be closer to the edge,” said Benny Sasson, CTO of SeismicAI, the startup with the globally unique offering of earthquake early warning “wherever it’s needed.”
“We received a request from the National Institute of Natural Resources in Canada that our platform be installed as an on-premise, encrypted, secure, holistic solution—because of national security and data security concerns,” Sasson said. “So that’s why we turned to Lyve Labs. We want to transform our solution into, for example, a rack we can bring to our client and plug into their data center, and attain compliance with all regulations and resources there.”
HUB Security partnered with Lyve Labs Israel because it wants to benefit from Seagate’s expertise in trusted data solutions. “Built by ex-military cybersecurity experts, HUB Security offers the next-gen tamper-proof hardware security module platform designed for multitenant and high-performance operation, as well as flexibility to be easily customized for any advanced algorithm and business application,” said Eyal Moshe, the CEO of HUB Security. “We asked Lyve Labs to help us with a proof of concept of this solution.” For this purpose, a streamable hackathon may be hosted at the Tel Aviv center later this year.
Among other projects, the innovation center in Tel Aviv conducted a successful trial run of the Lyve™ Drive Shuttle. The project, which involved collaboration with UPS, proved that moving data physically in shuttles via its reliable global shipping network instead of uploading can be more cost-effective and faster at scale. The Lyve Drive Shuttle was launched at the 2020 CES in Las Vegas as a part of the Lyve Drive Mobile Systems family.
In addition to proofs of concept, solutions offered by Lyve Labs Israel will include consultations with experts who can help solve data challenges, design and qualification services, playbooks for scaling efficiently, reference architectures, services that can optimize data management flows, and infrastructure and test-bench facilities. In the spirit of open innovation, reference architectures and case studies will be published publicly online so that other companies can easily implement similar solutions.
Lyve Labs Israel will be Seagate’s flagship innovation center. Another Lyve Labs center is located in Longmont, Colorado, United States. Additional Lyve Labs centers are being planned globally.