Overland’s Ordeal: Turnaround Continues as New Management Team Sets New Course, Readies New Products

Overland’s board in 2007 as the president of Silicon Valley Management Partners, a management consulting and M&A advisory firm.

Overland was founded in 1980 (as Overland Data), and originally manufactured IBM-compatible 9-track tape drives. The company diversified into disk-based storage with a small acquisition a decade ago, but tape-based storage has remained a core part of the company’s business. In fiscal 2010, tape-based products made up 46.6 percent of Overland’s revenue, according to the company’s 10-K filing.

“Tape still is a viable part of our business,” Mansolf told me. “You’ll see us continue to engineer a lot of tape products. It’s still a big market, and there are not a lot of other companies that manufacture tape any more that still have IP covering their tape-based technology.”

Still, tape-based data storage doesn’t exactly represent the future. As Overland CEO, Kelly took over the foray into “Snap” network attached storage technology that Overland had acquired from Adaptec in mid-2008 and reduced Overland’s workforce from 275 in early 2009 to about 200 today. He also hired former Data Robotics CEO Geoff Barrall as CTO, and established a corporate beachhead in San Jose, CA.

“MaxiScale fits into Geoff’s vision of where he wants to take the company,” Mansolf told me.

As Mansolf explained it, Overland’s Snap servers have limited scalability. MaxiScale already had customers and revenue, and Mansolf said MaxiScale could be easily integrated with Snap’s GuardianOS, giving Overland the ability to provide what she calls “cluster servers” to meet customers large-scale data storage needs.

Overland has not disclosed financial terms of its MaxiScale acquisition, but Mansolf hinted it was a bargain. “We were able to take advantage of an unfortunate situation, which was their inability to raise capital going forward.”

She also hinted that Overland has a series of new product launches in the pipeline for the coming year. “We’re excited for 2011,” she said. “We’re excited to be taking new products to market, and we’re feeling pretty bullish on the market.”

Pages: Page 1, Page 2

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.