History (1996): New Seagate

In the aftermath of the merger between Conner Peripherals and Seagate, by means of an exchange of stock share which corresponds in fact to the acquisition of Conner by Seagate, for a sum close to $1 billion, a new organizational structure has been put in place, one that must have been in the works long before the final agreement of the respective shareholders of both companies.

Adding them up, there are 80,000 or so employees in the combined venture, with business of $8.2 billion for CY95, which puts the whole operation at ≠1 in the storage world out of all manufacturers whether independent or not, with IBM’s SSD in second place.

Below Al Shugart, the big boss, there are now 6 executive VPs (see chart below).

The company’ business has been subdivided into 4 groups: storage products, head, media and software.

Seagate, which calls itself The Data Technology Company, is now the world leader in HDDs, both in terms of units sold and revenue, ahead of ≠2 Quantum.

It’s also the number one provider of recording heads, leading Read-Rite, with annual production hitting 200 million units, as well as ≠1 for tape drives after HP.

Most of the cartridge drives, inherited from Conner, are manufactured by MKE, the same subcontractor that provides Quantum with its HDDs.

Software business has accounted for nearly $40 million in the last quarter of 1995 and, not counting additional acquisitions, should reap $200 million in 1996.

Note that Arcada and Palindrome have been merged together to form a new storage management group, a sub-unit of Seagate Software, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Seagate Technology.

The merger of the European teams of both companies seems to have been achieved without incident. Seagate now boasts 2,500 people in Europe, most of whom are with the manufacturing plants in Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Italy and Scotland. There are a hundred or so employees in Scotland (customer service) and twice that figure in Amsterdam (logistics center).

The reorganization of the sales and marketing force in Europe, currently about 120 people, involved only 15 departures, according to Jean-Pierre Robinot, VP and GM, Europe, “None of which were terminations,” insists Henri Richard, former VP and GM of Conner who has taken up the new position of VP sales, Europe North and Corporate Europe.

The European software component consists of some 40 people under the management of VP Michel Montandon. European HQs will remain at Boulogne-Billancourt (France), where both product and software management have been grouped.

Not surprisingly, as Alan Shugart promised, the Conner name has dropped completely out of circulation.

Furthermore, Seagate has decided to halt all of Conner Peripherals’ developments in the SSA realm, in order to focus on the FC-AL serial interface.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 98, published on March 1996.