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Frank Harbist CEO of ProStor
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on Fri, January 23rd, 2009
Last edited 2009/02/21
Jump right to our comments
Joining the company after a stellar 21-year career at HP
Harbist joins ProStor after a stellar 21 year career at Hewlett-Packard (HP). Most recently, he was vice president of strategy and operations for HP's Business Critical Systems organization. Previously, as vice president and general manager of HP's Nearline Storage Division, he successfully grew the tape drive, automation and media businesses and extended its market leadership. Harbist repeated his success with HP's Storage Software Division by creating new revenue streams for the company via new product entries and acquisitions, and by entering markets for information life cycle management and unified infrastructure management. During his tenure at HP, Harbist as general manager also initiated and led the Server Appliances Operation and headed the pre-Compaq merger Industry Standard Server Division. Harbist has an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University and a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
"The Board is enthusiastic to bring in Frank Harbist; a tested and visionary leader who has successfully guided organizations through product, market, organizational and economic transitions," said Mark Perry, New Enterprise Associates (NEA) general partner. "His executive experience in the storage market and customer-driven focus on growing businesses makes Frank the ideal choice to lead ProStor to its next stage of growth as a dominant player in removable disk and long-term storage solutions."
"I'm thrilled to join ProStor and look forward to leveraging my industry experience and passion to drive its business growth and market success," asserted Frank Harbist, ProStor president and CEO. "While there are global economic challenges confronting all businesses, the creation of data and the need to properly retain information for longer periods of time continues to increase at an extraordinary pace. In ProStor, I see the opportunity to build on its increasing market position by continuing to drive customer-centric innovation while further establishing our technological leadership to better serve our customers."
Expanding the executive team, Steve Georgis, ProStor founder and director, will lead the RDX drive and media business as general manager reporting to Harbist.
Our comments :
Former President and CEO Steve Georgis left its positions to Harbist to be retrograded as manager of the hardware part of the company. Generally, when a CEO is replaced, there is at least a nice word for the former one in the press release. Here, no one. He is just named in the last sentence of the official news, even if Georgis was the founder of the company in May 2004 and raised $23.4 million. Remember also that this storage veteran was formerly founder and CEO of Network Photonics, in the founding team of Exabyte after working with storage leaders like StorageTek and Data General. Furthermore, he has been awarded 17 technology patents.
Up to know, ProStor has been relatively successful with its RDX removable HDDs, mainly through Tandberg Data that signed big OEMs like Dell, HP and NEC. The Norwegian company has sold more than 100,000 docks and 300,000 cartridges. [On its side, Imation also sells a much smaller part of these units but signed new big OEM, IBM]. But Tandberg is in financial troubles and, if this this big partner is going to miss, it will be a disaster for ProStor.
In October 2007, ProStor tries to diversify with the launch of an archiving appliance based on its removable disks. It's a rough challenge as the competition in this field is now huge and includes about all the storage giants. Furthermore, it's risky for an eventual user to archive its data on proprietary media - look at what happens recently to Plasmon -, and here coming from a start-up.
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