AdStar (an acronym for Advanced Storage and Retrieval) was a division of IBM that encompassed all the company's storage products including disk, tape and optical storage systems and storage software.
Company type | Subsidiary |
---|---|
Industry | Data storage |
Founded | 1992 |
Defunct | 1995 |
Fate | Restructured |
Successor | IBM Storage Systems Division |
Key people | Ed Zschau, CEO |
Parent | International Business Machines |
In 1992 IBM combined their Storage Products businesses comprising eleven sites in eight countries into this division.[1] On its creation, AdStar became the largest information storage business in the world. It had a revenue of $6.11 billion, of which $500 million were sales to other manufacturers (OEM sales), and generated a gross profit of about $440 million (before taxes and restructuring).[2]
To provide additional autonomy—thereby further encouraging OEM sales—IBM established AdStar as a wholly owned subsidiary in April 1993, with outsider Ed Zschau as Chairman and CEO.[2] To some observers this appeared to be an admission by IBM that the storage subsidiary no longer provided a strategic advantage by providing proprietary devices for its mainframe products,[2] and that it was being positioned to be sold off as a part of then the IBM chairman John Akers' business strategy. The replacement of Akers by Lou Gerstner in April 1993 changed the strategy from spinout to turnaround,[3] but the disk drive business under Zschau continued to be troubled, declining to $3 billion in 1995.[4]
Zschau left AdStar in October 1995, replaced by IBM insider Jim Vanderslice.[4] The AdStar division was dismembered thereafter; the AdStar Distributed Storage Manager (ADSM) was renamed Tivoli Storage Manager in 1999,[5] and the disk drive business component was sold off to Hitachi in 2003.[6]