Quantum Chairman and CEO Rick Belluzzo told The Station after his company’s quarterly earnings call on Jan. 28 that Quantum may have lost a good OEM deduplication partner in EMC, but that a replacement will be announced soon.
EMC, as you might recall, acquired dedupe specialist Data Domain last year and already had Avamar’s IP in house, so three brands of dedupe weren’t necessary. EMC had been selling Quantum’s tape storage and dedupe for several years, but when Data Domain was acquired, it didn’t see the need to continue the dedupe part of the deal. EMC will continue to resell Quantum’s tape storage, however.
“We were disappointed in their decision, of course,” Belluzzo said following the DD deal. “But that’s business. We had, I thought, a good relationship with EMC for a number of years. But they made their decision to go their way, and we’re going ours.”
Belluzzo said that Quantum will be announcing a new dedupe OEM partner to help replenish the royalties it is losing from EMC, which totaled about $4 million in the September quarter.
Belluzzo also said Quantum had “another good quarter” despite the income loss.
“Our gross margins continued to be some of the highest we have recorded in 10 years,” Belluzzo said. “We reported non-GAAP operating profit of $22.7 million or 12 percent of revenue.”
Go here for a transcript of the report.