Legendary Finis Conner Back in Storage Industry

Millenniata, Inc., a new permanent archival technology company, names Finis Conner as new chief executive officer, effective immediately, succeeding Henry O’Connell, the founding CEO.

O’Connell, who will remain a consultant and member of the Millenniata board of directors, said: "I enthusiastically endorse this appointment as the company moves forward with an aggressive marketing campaign for its innovative products."

finis_conner_back_in_storage_industry Finis Conner brings over 30 years of experience in the storage business to Millenniata. Conner co-founded Shugart Associates in 1973, where they produced and sold 8" floppy and hard (HDD) disc drives. The company was sold to Xerox Corporation in 1977. In 1979, Conner co-founded Seagate Technology, where he conceived the original 5 1/4" Winchester disc drive. In 1986, he founded Conner Peripherals, Inc., Fortune magazine’s pick for ‘America’s fastest-growing company.’ Conner Peripherals was the first to develop and manufacture 3 1/2" and 2 1/2" Winchester disk drives used in personal computers. Conner was the first company to receive the Entrepreneur Company Award from both Harvard and the Stanford Business Schools in the same year. He led the growth of the company to $1.4 billion in its 4th year of business and $2.7 billion in its 10th year when Seagate acquired the company.

"We are excited to have someone of Finis’ caliber to take Millenniata to the next level. He is a proven leader that understands what is needed to bring a disruptive technology to market and realize the full potential of this opportunity," Allen Webb, the chairman of the board, said, "We acknowledge that Henry’s expertise helped give focus and vision during Millenniata’s founding stages. He was able to secure the funding and relationships necessary to grow the technology from an idea to a product."

"I am excited to have the opportunity to take this innovative technology to market, and grateful to Henry for leading Millenniata from the concept stage to the product stage," said Conner. "He has been a driving force in generating the excitement necessary to attract seed investors, a talented team, and a strong board of directors that will allow the company to be very successful as it grows."

Millenniata, Inc. is a permanent optical archival technology company based in Provo, Utah. The company’s patented Write Once, Read Forever™ technology is the world’s first stable digital archival solution that has set the new standard for longevity. The solution is composed of the M-DISC and M-WRITER drive. The M-DISC is the first backward compatible non-dye based DVD optical technology constructed of inorganic materials that are known to last centuries. The M-WRITER drive is a high-quality optical drive that is specifically designed to laser etch digital information onto the M-DISC. This combination allows information to be written once and read forever offering the best archival data storage solution in the industry.

Comments

If we had to select the best executives in the history of the disk drive industry, certainly Finis Conner will be one of them, along with Mike Cannon, John Coyne, Matt Massengill or Al Shugart.

But since he sold Conner Peripherals in 1995, an HDD maker culminating at $2.7 billion in yearly sales, the 'visionary" has accumulated bad ideas, like Storecovery in 1997, Conner Technology in 1998, StorCard in 2001 and iGotchr in 2008.

But Finis Conner is fundamentally an entrepreneur. It seems than he cannot sleep without a new idea and nothing can stop it to participate to start-ups. Failing does'nt matter. He always continues. Now, being 66 years old, he is involved in Millenniata, and it's probably not his last venture.

Millenniata's optical data storage technology has been developed by professors Barry Lunt and Matthew R. Linford at Brigham Young University, owners of the patent licensed to the start-up. The 'revolutionary' solution is based on a 'Write Once, Read Forever' M-DISC supposed to last 1,000+ years. There will be a 4.7GB M-DISC 'rock-hard' media and a M-Writer drive.

It's not easy to judge precisely the technology of Millenniata because the company has not revealed the exact composition of layers and the substrate (probably polycarbonate). The good idea for archiving is that it doesn't use sensible organic dyes. But which ones?

The advantage here is that these discs could be read on standard DVD drives but they need a powerful laser and then a special device to be burned.

One of the best specialists of optical disc that we know has tried to get a disc to test it, but he got nothing.

A recent report, Accelerated Life Cycle Comparison of Millenniata - Archival DVD, by Ivan Svrcek, Life Cycle and Environmental Engineering Branch, Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division, concludes: "The post-test error statistics show all Millenniata disks pass the ECMA standard. The data recorded on these disks was recoverable. The Millenniata disks were the only ones tested that maintained information integrity." The others DVDs analyzed were from branded Delkin, MAM-A, Mitsubishi, Taiyo Yuden and Verbatim media.

The start-up, founded in 2008, will have to find subcontractors to make the discs and the proprietary writers, to offer second source manufacturing, and finally to get national and then international standardization. Here Finis Conner can also help, but he is not a specialist of optical, being mainly involved in quite different magnetic disk and tape technology.

There is a need for the IT industry to have an archiving media, the only serious one being silver microfilm or microfiche but where the information are manually accessed with the need of a microform reader.

At least two others companies have tried to enter into archiving optical discs:
Plasmon OMS (formerly Digipress) with Century Disc on glass substrate but the company is in financial liquidation in France, and

InPhase spending $95 million in ten years before being sold probably for a tiny sum to an investor.