Not too long ago, I got a chance to talk with Jillian Mansolf, who joined San Diego’s Overland Storage (NASDAQ: [[ticker:OVRL]]) as vice president of global sales and marketing about 18 months ago. A few days earlier, Overland had disclosed its acquisition of Sunnyvale, CA-based MaxiScale, a three-year-old data storage startup, a deal that prompted me to seek an update from the company.
Once again, though, I was struck by the long ordeal Overland has faced since 2005, when the company lost its single biggest customer. Hewlett-Packard had decided to phase out its business with Overland, which served as the manufacturer of tape-based data storage equipment made and sold under the HP brand.
Six years ago, HP accounted for more than half of Overland’s revenue—which totaled $235 million in fiscal 2005. Filings for Overland’s fiscal 2010, which ended June 27, show that HP represented 22.5 percent of Overland’s total net revenue, which had plunged to $77.7 million. The loss of HP’s business, Mansolf said, “changed the whole perspective of the business model for the company” and required significant restructuring. “That truly has been the balancing act over the past two to four years.”
Mansolf, who previously worked at Data Robotics, Dell Computer, and Maxtor, is part of the management team that Eric Kelly assembled after he stepped in as CEO in January 2009. Kelly joined
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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