Iomega becomes services-oriented

By Warwick Ashford for Iomega

Johannesburg, 01 Nov 2006

Storage is no longer about hardware, it's now all about data management, says Romain Cholat, Iomega's international VP for sales and marketing.

"The recent acquisition of San Diego-based managed services and outsourced IT company CSCI was the first step for Iomega towards becoming a data management service provider in line with international market trends," Cholat told journalists in Sandton yesterday.

Showcasing some of the latest products for small businesses, with typically fewer than 50 employees, Cholat said it would in future bundle other services and third-party software with its hardware to enable this market to manage data in a more secure way.

"With the acquisition of CSCI, Iomega is likely to move beyond storage hardware towards services like firewalls and virtual private networks, Web hosting and desktop management," he explained.

According to Cholat, Iomega aims to bring to market entry-level data management services at a price that small business can afford.

Bobby Kennedy, key account manager of Iomega in SA, said these bundled services and software were intended to complement products specifically aimed at small business.

No backup

Highlighting some new products, such as the 500GB StorCenter network hard drive and REV 70GB removable storage backup drives, Kennedy said these were aimed at "genuine small business", which he defined as companies with 10 to 20 employees.

"Companies of this size typically need solutions with enterprise-level performance that are easy to implement, do not require specialist on-site IT staff, and are low-cost," he said.

Despite the availability of solutions like the REV 70, Kennedy said it was "frightening" that there were still few small businesses backing up data.

"Only about 40% of small businesses in the UK are doing regular backups - the message does not seem to be getting through," he said.

Conceding REV technology was not yet an industry standard, Cholat said sales of 225 000 drives and 1.2 million disks in the past two years indicated Iomega was on the right track.