History (1999): Global Maintech Acquires Breece Hill

“Their products are good, but there were problems among their managers,” a well-informed U.S. source says, explaining the difficulties encountered by the 6 year old Breece Hill Technologies, a privately-owned Boulder, CO library maker, mainly for DLT, but also for 8mm AIT and Magstar 3570.

The $30 million company never quite took off in a market that is nevertheless growing, by some 30% yearly according to Freeman Associates, confirmed by the financial results of companies such as Overland or ATL.

Last month, Breece Hill was acquired by Global Maintech in exchange for equity, with the financial participation of the Hambrecht & Quist Group, which will provide funding to both companies.

The agreement is subject to the approval of Breece Hill shareholders, who will receive around 20% of Global Maintech stock.

Global Maintech, in Eden, MN, formerly Computer Aided Time Share and then Mirror Technologies, is a 14-year old company with 79 employees in enterprise management solutions for data centers.

Its main product is Virtual Command Center (VCC), originally developed in Japan by Circle Corp., a master console, comprising both hardware and software, that provides a single point-of-control for mainframe, Unix, NT and network systems.

Andrew Kahn, president of H&Q, explained his company’s investment in the two firms: “We believe Breece Hill has excellent products in the growing sector of storage management for data centers and that Maintech provides the strengths of administration, finance and engineering to help maximize Breece Hill’s potential.”

Maintech has additionnal offices in California and Georgia. By the end of ’98, the company had sold a cumulative total of 32 VCCs to 14 customers, including BMC Software, SAP and StorageTek.

Sales for the nine months ended last September were $5.1 million compared to $2.8 million for the same period in 1997.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 135 on April 1999 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.