Over many years Seagate has diversified its business from just manufacturing hard drives into other hardware and software that broadly fits into the storage category.

In June 2014 the company brought together a number of software and hardware acquisitions to form Seagate Cloud Systems and Solutions.

The product offering was largely focused around NAS solutions for SMB and medium sized business, the backup software that supports these devices and then a cloud based backup solution.

New Zealand is too small a market for them to run their own cloud data center like is in place in the United States, so recently they partnered up with AO Cloud - the data center / cloud division of local tech distributor, Connector Systems.

At the same time Seagate has been appointing more specialist distributors globally that focus on this more business-centric division of the wider Seagate business.

Just this month this has seen Connector Systems also set up as the specialist New Zealand distributor for the Cloud Systems and Solutions division.

At the launch earlier this week, it became incredibly clear that the two incumbents in the local SMB NAS device market, QNAP and Synology, are in for some serious competition from Seagate.

Within the range from Seagate they sell a 4 and 8 bay 1U data center focused NAS solution, as well as stand alone non-data center solution.

Each of these products is available as either a Linux based or Windows based version. In a heavily Windows based environment the Active Directory solutions that the later solution offers are quite impressive. Otherwise like most modern NAS solutions there seems to be an overwhelming list of features built into the box.

Can Seagate leverage its years of experience in hard drives to displace the NAS drive incumbent's? We certainly think they've got a good chance.