History (1997): DDF Pertec Into Receivership

Tape drive manufacturer DDF Pertec (Cholet, France) went into receivership last month.

The firm manufactured reel-to-reel tape drives aimed at telecommunications billing applications, notably for Alcatel.

In order to bounce back in a declining market, the company jumped aboard the Imation Travan drive bandwagon in 1995.

“This diversification tactic towards Travan didn’t work, primarily for commercial rather than technical reasons,” explained GM Andre Pouget-Abadie.

For one thing, the Travan market did not take off as expected. Competition was stiff from products such as Iomega’s Zip and even CDRs or certain M-O drives. Some also have criticized Imation’s corporate strategy as an underlying problem. It’s worth noting also that DDF was the only company to put all its eggs in the Travan basket.

The current number of QIC or Travan drive manufacturers has waned considerably. Archive, Caliper, ComByte, Conner Peripherals, Everex, Irwin, Nakamichi/ Mountain, Rexon, Sankyo and Teac have all bowed out. Aiwa retains a discreet presence, while Iomega has abandoned the “Imation standard.”

All that remain are Exabyte, Hewlett-Packard, M4, Seagate, Tandberg and Tecmar.

Pouget-Abadie said he is “reasonably optimistic” about the future of his company, which employs some 30 people. He still hopes the firm can be saved – that is to say, acquired by a storage giant because of its considerable R&D and production know-how.

Furthermore, DDF Pertec also boasts a new and as yet unreleased technology for high density tape with excellent transfer rates based on research undertaken by Thompson CSF (Tandberg also worked on the same subject, as well as Quantum, since the cartridge involved is the same as the half-inch DLT).

The Pertee name, which started out as an American firm, has been associated with magnetic tape for over a quarter century.

DDF Pertec is a subsidiary of the Pertec Group (Toulouse, France), which has, via Pic Technology, another US subsidiary called Pertec Memories (Los Gatos, CA), founded in 1994 following the acquisition of technology assets from Summit Memory Systems, a division of Mountain Computer, developer of QIC drives.

It is nonetheless quite likely that the downfall of DDF Pertec spells the end for the whole group.

Only 2 tape drive makers will remain in Europe after that, M4 and Tandberg.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 115 on August 1997 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.