StorageTek: The Next Disk Titan?

When Pat Martin took over as president and CEO of Storage Technology Corp. (StorageTek) (NYSE: STK) in July 2000, he would have been met with wails of laughter if he'd claimed the struggling tape company was destined to conquer the storage disk business.

But today, just three years after the company looked as if it could be sucked into a swamp of financial problems, Martin makes that claim with a very straight face (see photo, left) and he apparently believes that StorageTek is in a position to unseat the likes of industry kingpin EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) in the disk market.

"Almost every decade there are new leaders in the disk business," he says. "EMC came in with RAID technology in the mid-'90s, and they built, obviously, a terrific company. But every time there's a technology change, I think there's an opportunity for leadership to change."

What's this supposed "inflection point" Martin's referring to? Low-cost ATA disk drives, which he says will account for the vast majority of disk storage that's sold in the years ahead.

"I strongly believe that ATA is going to redefine how people use vintage subsystems," he says. "If 90 percent of the stuff sitting on primary disk is never accessed, and most of the data sitting on disk is replicated information, then you've got a technology that's so substantially cheaper without an awful big penalty in terms of response time, what would you use?"StorageTek, which was considered a purely tape company when Martin took over, has been trying to promote itself as an overall storage company offering a variety of different storage products and services. While tape continues to be StorageTek's main source of income, the company's disk business – with a special emphasis on its new ATA disk-based backup system, BladeStore – has been growing strong (see StorageTek to Punch Into Disk Backup and StorageTek Puts Backups on Auto).

Last month, the company announced that disk sales during its second fiscal quarter jumped 19 percent, to $42 million (see StorageTek Keeps on Growth Curve). That included sales of BladeStore as well as StorageTek's D-series primary disk subsystems, which it OEMs from LSI Logic Storage Systems Inc. StorageTek also announced last week that it had slashed prices for its D-series, as it continues to pump up the pressure on its formidable competitors in the disk space.

Obviously, it still has a long way to go before it's considered a disk storage leader in the ranks of EMC, Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), or IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM).

But Martin, 62, may just be the guy to drive StorageTek's disk business forward, having already helped turn the company around even as the tech bubble was deflating with a lugubrious ppppfffffffffffffffft. StorageTek recently reported its twelfth consecutive quarter of earnings growth, and since Martin came onboard, the company has more than doubled its stock price (see StorageTek Keeps on Growth Curve).

Before joining StorageTek, he worked for Xerox Corp. (NYSE: XRX) for 23 years, finishing his career there in 2000 as president of the company's North American Solutions Group.Martin recently spoke with Byte and Switch Senior Editor Eugénie Larson about StorageTek's aspirations in the disk market, its international outlook, and diseased Colorado prairie dogs, among other topics. To read the full interview, click on the links below:

— Eugénie Larson, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch