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Technology Stocks : Disk Drive Sector Discussion Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Yogi - Paul who wrote (8474)	7/13/2000 12:07:45 AM
From: Stitch	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9256

Gents; I think we could say the story clipped below comes under the category of "You can't keep a good man down...especially if he has tons of dough <G>" Why do I feel like standing up an cheering. I actually would if my bones didn't creak so much. Best, Stitch Shugart's start-up goes back to roots BY THERESE POLETTI Mercury News Al Shugart, the quirky entrepreneur who was fired from his own disk-drive company two years ago, is going back into the storage business. Shugart, 69, plans to announce today that he is investing $1 million in a new company he is co-founding called Shugart Technology Inc. that will develop network storage technology. In a way, the start-up is a return to Shugart's roots. Shugart Technology was the name that he used more than 20 years ago, when he co-founded a little disk-drive company with Finis Conner and Tom Mitchell. The trio later renamed the company Seagate Technology Inc., and it became one of the titans in the disk-drive industry. Shugart led Seagate until 1998, when he was fired by the board of directors, which said it was unhappy with the slow pace of change at the Scotts Valley-based company during a time of industry turmoil. After his ouster, he became an investor and consultant helping entrepreneurs launch new businesses. ``As part of Al's departure package from Seagate when he was fired, he retained the right to have the name Shugart Technology,'' said John Monroe, an analyst at Gartner Group Inc.'s Dataquest. ``This is the re-emergence.'' Something tangible Shugart Technology, also known as STI, is based in Irvine and so far has 11 employees. The company is developing software and hardware tools so that customers using massive amounts of storage to run their businesses can detect or diagnose problems before their data comes crashing down and erases their profits. ``We are not entering the commodity market,'' Shugart said, referring to the lack of profits in the traditional disk-drive industry. ``We are trying to do something productive within the network area, something tangible. A lot of new companies that are starting up, like some of the dot-coms, have nothing tangible.'' Shugart's ouster from Seagate was the talk of Silicon Valley two summers ago -- in part because everyone knew him from his unsuccessful 1996 campaign to get his dog, Earnest, elected to Congress. After his departure from Seagate, Shugart continued his involvement in politics, leading a failed referendum effort that attempted to add ``none of the above'' as an option on California ballots. The new company will be chaired by Shugart and run on a day-to-day basis by Chief Executive Rick Brechtlein, who was most recently senior vice president of sales, marketing and customer support at Xyratex Ltd., a developer of products and services for the high-speed networking, digital broadcasting and data storage markets. ``We are very aware of the fact that in today's world, where storage is becoming centric to the business model, every business is dependent on their database,'' Brechtlein said. ``It's important to keep that asset up and running. Using that premise, we went out to develop an entire suite of software and hardware products.'' Seagate a customer? STI plans to offer the first of its family of hardware and software products for testing networked storage devices in about two weeks, with additional rollouts planned this year. STI says it will market its products, which can also perform remote diagnostics, directly to storage companies, who can resell the testing features to their customers. Shugart said that STI's testing tools will be extremely easy to use, and individuals who are not engineers will be able to conduct tests on storage devices. ``I can use it. It's really simple. It's not for nerds,'' he said. STI hopes that all major storage makers -- including Seagate -- will become customers because none of them are developing these kind of easy-to-use testing services for a wide range of storage systems. A spokesman for Seagate said that he was not familiar with Shugart's new venture and therefore could not comment. Monroe at Dataquest said that STI is targeting a potentially huge arena because most companies have racks of mismatched servers and disk drives, all connected in a network. ``There is an awful lot of time spent testing and configuring,'' he said. ``It's a big challenge. Part of the difficulty in making this stuff work is analyzing the ways they don't work.'' Monroe estimates that the market for these type of network storage tools could possibly reach in excess of $2 billion by 2003. ``Al's re-emergence into this market should serve as a wake-up call to the industry,'' Monroe said. ``I bet some of the major players are going to go back to the drawing board.''