History (1996): Dynatek Acquires Cygnet Assets

The financial difficulties of ATG Cygnet (Toulouse, France), maker of 12-inch WORM media and drives, pushed under the Chapter XI proceedings its American subsidiary, ATG Cygnet (San Jose, CA), which manufactures 12-inch optical jukeboxes.

Both firms found themselves up for sale, together or individually.

The Canadian company, Dynatek Automation Systems (Bedford, Nova Scotia) has just acquired the assets of the automatic library maker for an unknown sum, and will form a new division to be called Cygnet Storage Solutions, Inc. (SCCI). Douglas Peek, COO of Dynatek, was named president and CEO of CSSI.

“Cygnet Storage Solutions will be the flagship company for Dynatek’s entry into the United Sates market and for the expansion of our enterprise storage systems business worldwide,” said Sam Gurr, CEO of Dynatek, a $70 million company.

Until now, the Canadian company was never a hardware manufacturer, but instead an integrator and reseller of SCSI storage subsystems, based on RAID or optical disks, mainly 5.25-inch MO disks, CD-R or CD-ROM.

Even so, Dynatek had signed a $2 million contract for 12-inch optical drives, although that was some time ago, in 1990 .

In its remarks about the latest acquisition, Dynatek is stressing a future product, a scalable and upgradable CD library, and is also emphasizing the fact that Cygnet is already well established in the US Federal market, where Dynatek has been looking for an entree for some time, despite the risks that it will compete there wih former ATG Cygnet customers.

Founded in 1989, Dynatek has a 120,000 square-foot facility in Bedford, also its headquarters, along with sales offices in the UK, US and Israel. Earlier this year, it opened an R&D facility in Boulder, CO.

Cygnet, founded in 1986, had once before undergone Chapter XI proceedings in 1993, the year it was acquired by ATG.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 105, published on October 1996.