Tandberg Latest Tech Victim Of Recession

Even as the data storage industry has shown itself to be relatively resilient during the world recession, individual players certainly are not immune to financial trouble.

The holding company for Norwegian-based tape storage company Tandberg Data filed for bankruptcy in its home country court on 24 April after it could not cover a loan payment to New York City-based Cyrus Capital.

Tandberg, a major OEM for both IBM and Hewlett-Packard, becomes the first major storage supplier to file for bankruptcy protection since the recession began last summer.

As a result of the legal action, Cyrus Capital will acquire the assets of the company and become majority owner. The new operational HQ for the company will be in Dortmund, Germany.

Tandberg Data is the holding company for its major business line, Tandberg Storage, which designs and makes digital tape drives for OEM sales to the low- and midrange markets.

Despite the bankruptcy action, a company spokesman said, Tandberg’s subsidiaries around the world will continue their day-to-day operations, including Tandberg Data Corp. in the United States.

The company, which launched its T120-Plus Storage Library on 20 April, will continue to manufacture products and has another launch scheduled for next month.

Tandberg also has foreign-operation offices in Japan, France, Germany, Singapore and the U.K. The company also has branch sales offices in Brazil, China and Italy.

“The operations of the Tandberg Data subsidiaries will continue to operate in this new structure, with a much reduced debt burden,” Tandberg Data CEO Pat Clarke said in a news release. “The difficult steps we are taking now will enable us to build a company that can be successful in providing data protection solutions and support to our valued customers, suppliers, and business partners for a long time to come.”

Tandberg Data is the victim of the crash of global financial markets and the loss of credit, the spokesman said.

“It’s specific to the trends in the tape industry,” Forrester Research Principal Analyst Stephanie Balaouras told eWEEK. “Tape isn’t dead yet, but it’s not growing, and it will start to decline.

“Certainly the declining cost of disk and deduplication has played a role in stagnant growth, but I believe new cloud-based services for backup, archiving, secondary storage and disaster recovery are also contributing to its decline.

“In fact, I think it’s the combination of dedupe plus cloud that will finally end of the life of tape.”