Robert Stephens' mission is a variation on the old saw, "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts."
As chief executive of Adaptec, Stephens has supervised the company's shift from a maker of components used for data storage purposes to a builder of complete storage systems.
Under Stephens' watch, Adaptec has gobbled up a couple of companies that make networked storage devices -- Adaptec bought Eurologic in 2003 and snapped up Snap Appliance in July.
At first glance, the move to make whole systems is a curious one: Why would Adaptec want to threaten the supplier relationship it enjoys with companies like Hewlett-Packard by competing against them? And why, in the Snap deal, enter the so-called network-attached storage market when heavyweight Microsoft is making a major push there?
New revenue opportunities, of course, in the growing data storage market. Adaptec earlier this month predicted that it would bring in more than $200m in storage systems revenue for the year ending March 2006. That's a hefty chunk for a company that overall took in $452.9m for the year ended March 31.
And Stephens says his company can navigate the challenges. As he sees it, Adaptec can continue to team up with the big guns of storage by building more-complete products for them. Indeed, the company recently announced that it is supplying technology used in new storage products from IBM.
In a recent interview with ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com, Stephens discussed Adaptec's goal to be both a parts and systems company, and hinted at a possible partnership with Microsoft.
Tell me about your strategy in moving Adaptec from being a components company to a full-fledged storage system seller. It seems kind of counterintuitive. You're going up against big guns like EMC, IBM and HP -- even Microsoft, with its network-attached storage effort. What's more, you risk upsetting partners in your components business. Why is this the right approach for Adaptec?
You have to go back in history a little bit. When most people think about Adaptec, they think about it as a hardware-centric company, and that has historically been true. But even going back five years, at least, you find that the primary engineering work inside of Adaptec is software. Two-thirds of our engineering effort is really around software.
We think the key to major success is having a presence both on the OEM side and the channel side. It's a very natural extension to move from a SCSI host bus adapter business to starting to manage storage within a disk array. So more than seven years ago, we staked out a position in RAID, which is all about software, really.
So then the next natural extension to that thinking was that we were very host-centric, in our view -- that is, managing storage that was either in the server or directly attached to the server. So it made sense to manage spindles that were part of either a storage fabric SAN or some kind of external environment away from the server.
What makes this unique is that we are the only ones that come out of external storage with a host view. You mentioned EMC as an example. EMC really doesn't have a host footprint. They don't sell to Dell or IBM or HP.
