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AdStar

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AdStar
Company typeSubsidiary
IndustryData storage
Founded1992; 32 years ago (1992)
Defunct1995 (1995)
FateRestructured
SuccessorIBM Storage Systems Division
Key people
Ed Zschau, CEO
ParentInternational Business Machines

AdStar (an acronym for Advanced Storage and Retrieval) was a division of IBM that encompassed all the company's storage products including disk, tape and optical storage systems and storage software.

History

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In 1992 IBM combined their Storage Products businesses comprising eleven sites in eight countries into this division.[1] On its creation, AdStar became the largest information storage business in the world. It had a revenue of $6.11 billion, of which $500 million were sales to other manufacturers (OEM sales), and generated a gross profit of about $440 million (before taxes and restructuring).[2]

To provide additional autonomy—thereby further encouraging OEM sales—IBM established AdStar as a wholly owned subsidiary in April 1993, with outsider Ed Zschau as Chairman and CEO.[2] To some observers this appeared to be an admission by IBM that the storage subsidiary no longer provided a strategic advantage by providing proprietary devices for its mainframe products,[2] and that it was being positioned to be sold off as a part of then the IBM chairman John Akers' business strategy. The replacement of Akers by Lou Gerstner in April 1993 changed the strategy from spinout to turnaround,[3] but the disk drive business under Zschau continued to be troubled, declining to $3 billion in 1995.[4]

Zschau left AdStar in October 1995, replaced by IBM insider Jim Vanderslice.[4] The AdStar division was dismembered thereafter; the AdStar Distributed Storage Manager (ADSM) was renamed Tivoli Storage Manager in 1999,[5] and the disk drive business component was sold off to Hitachi in 2003.[6]

References

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  1. ^ "Rochester chronology". IBM Archives. International Business Machines Corporation. 2003. Archived from the original on January 5, 2019.
  2. ^ a b c Fisher, Lawrence M. (April 24, 1993). "I.B.M. Gives AdStar Storage Unit More Autonomy". The New York Times. p. A39. Archived from the original on November 9, 2012. Retrieved 2023-08-11.
  3. ^ Hof, Robert D. (May 10, 1993). "Ed Zschau Doesn't Fit Big Blue's Mold—And That's the Point". Bloomberg Businessweek. Bloomberg L.P. Archived from the original on January 28, 2021.
  4. ^ a b Abate, Tom (October 1, 1995). "Some Big Blue attitude". San Francisco Chronicle. Hearst Newspapers. Archived from the original on December 8, 2014.
  5. ^ Russel, Charlie; Sharon Crawford (2000). Microsoft Windows 2000 Server Administrator's Companion. Microsoft Press. p. 1371. ISBN 9781572318199 – via Google Books.
  6. ^ Aughton, Simon (June 6, 2002). "Hitachi buys IBM disk drive business". Expert Reviews. Dennis Publishing. Archived from the original on March 11, 2011.
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