History (1995): NCE Acquires Tape Business of Mountain (Nakamichi)

The Japanese group Nakamichi is pulling out of the magnetic storage industry entirely.

After yielding MOST to its management team, Summit Memories in Pertec, the Japanese firm has now sold off its data cartridge and DAT business, along with the associated software of its subsidiary, Mountain Network Solutions (Scotts Valley, CA), to National Customer Engineering or NCE (San Diego, CA).

The purchase comes only 6 months after privately-held NCE acquired Emerald Systems (San Diego, CA), a tape backup systems supplier and key Mountain competitor.

Like Emerald, Mountain is now a division of NCE Computer Group, whose activities will be relocated to NCE’s San Diego facility.

Consolidation is planned for the London, UK, offices that both companies currently operate.

NCE plans to keep Mountain and Emerald sales efforts and brand names separate for the time being, but this strategy will be reevaluated over the next 6 months.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 94, published on November 1995.