Overland Storage Unveils New Data-Storage Initiative

After slashing 17 percent of its workforce and making other cutbacks, San Diego’s Overland Storage (NASDAQ: [[ticker:OVRL]]) announced today what CEO Vern LoForti describes as a significant initiative in the company’s turnaround effort.

The longtime maker of data storage equipment has been reeling since 2005, when Hewlett-Packard said it was phasing out purchases of tape-based storage equipment that Overland made under HP’s brand name. Overland makes a variety of tape and disk-based data storage equipment, but its business continued to erode.

Now LoForti, who has been trying to turn around Overland as CEO since 2007, is announcing the creation of “a solutions engineering group” that will work with partners to develop and integrate “end-to-end” data storage systems for its customers. The move follows a $9 million financing in December and a restructuring last week that reduced Overland’s workforce by 53 employees, or 17 percent, to a total staff of 275. (An update to the Xconomy San Diego layoff tracker is here.) The company also implemented a 10 percent pay cut for all salaried employees, including LoForti and other executives.

“This new strategy fits right in to this restructuring at Overland, where we’re leaner and meaner,” LoForti says. The company plans to use its partnerships with Mobotix Vision Systems, which makes video surveillance and Internet-based archiving systems, and with a software developer to provide “plug and play” data storage systems for its customers. Using partnerships to develop such systems “means we don’t have this huge R&D cost” LoForti says.

Overland intends to provide its systems to meet customers’ data archiving and business continuity needs, and for Internet-based “network video recorder” systems. Ravi Pendekanti, Overland’s vice president of worldwide sales and marketing, is particularly encouraged by the booming demand for video surveillance technology. “What most people want,” Pendekanti says, “is to store their surveillance data—but to be able to retrieve the video in the event something happens, whether it’s a slip and fall on company property or a terrorist act.”

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.