Jonathan Huberman, CEO, Iomega
Beware Seagate and Western Digital, Iomega is on the come-back!
Speaking yesterday at EMC’s Innovation, Information and Security Summit held at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters in Santa Clara, Iomega CEO, Jonathan Huberman (pictured), predicted a massive consolidation of the consumer portable storage market (think USB hard drives), with only a handful of companies surviving in this cut-throat market largely dominated by the disk drive makers themselves.
“There’s only a handful of companies in this market that can invest as much as we do in R&D and marketing. The disk drive makers are investing a lot in improving aerial density not really in design, packaging, etc.”, explains Huberman.
Inspite of being dependent of disks suppliers like Seagate and Western Digital for its external USB drives, Iomega CEO still think it can compete in the portable storage market with the drive makers themselves.
“Seagate and Western Digital can make money selling portable drives when Iomega can’t. However, EMC is buying a lot of enterprise drives from them too. So it’s not like we don’t have a leverage there”, adds Iomega CEO.
But long term, Iomega is betting on the network storage market, where competition is sparse, rather than the USB drives for growth and profits.
“Consumers with several PCs in their home are the prime target for those network drives. But we have to make those network drives easy to use if we want consumers to buy. It’s going to take some time and our advantage is that we have more than 60 engineers working full time on it. That’s more than anyone else in this industry”, points Huberman.
On the question about Flash drive adoption in the consumer market, Huberman doesn’t see it happening before Christmas 2010… that’s 2 years from now!
[...] also touched on the SSD opportunity. For more details on what Huberman said yo can also read this previous [...]