History 2000: Major Housecleaning at StorageTek

Officially, according to the press release, “David E. Weiss recommended to the board of directors that he step down as chairman, president and CEO of the company.”

More likely, he is the victim of the last few fiscal quarters, which no doubt disappointed Storage Technology shareholders. He will nevertheless continue in office until a successor has been found.

Weiss, 55, took the helm at StorageTek in May 1996, when he replaced Ryal Poppa after only 5 years with the company. Before that, he had spent 23 years with IBM moving from junior programmer to director of Big Blue’s Boulder, CO laboratory.

Victor Perez, StorageTek’s COO, has also resigned from the company.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In addition to 600 layoffs at the end of last year, a new scale-back of 500 to 600 people has just been announced for 1FQ20, throughout all operational areas, particularly consulting and service businesses.

Additionally, yet another restructuring is under way. First, the company consolidated its 6 business units into only 2: enterprise (including former nearline and enterprise disk) and client server (including former client server tape and disk, storage networking and SAN).

Roger Archibald, who was VP and GM of the enterprise DASD business, will lead the new enterprise business group.

Pierre Cousin, who was GM of Southem Europe, was named VP and GM of the client server business group.

Another Frenchman, Alain Andréoli, advances from VP and GM EMEA to corporate VP and GM for international operations, global services and e-business.

Gary Francis, formerly in charge of the nearline business, steps up to VP of strategic planning.

Finally, Katherine Ott was named VP of global marketing.

All will report to the future CEO.

Meanwhile, U.S. and Canada sales and services are being reorganized to focus on indirect channels rather than on direct sales.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 145 on February 2000 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.