While funding the IBM deal will be a financial burden, Plasmon says that it has become the industry norm for OEMs to seek financial support when marketing third party products. IBM’s endorsement of UDO, it argues, will be a significant factor in establishing UDO as the standard for optical archival storage.
Plasmon says it was told by IBM earlier this year that it wanted to resell a full range of UDO drives libraries and media for launch in September this year. The company says that sales to IBM could provide a significant increase in its future UDO revenue.
The Melbourne, UK-based company could do with a boost to its sales after a miserable second half. In the year to March 31, it made a loss of 99.3m pounds ($17.1m), up from a loss of 4.3m pounds ($7.9m) on revenue 10.3% lower at 50.1m pounds ($82.6m).
With an OEM deal with Hewlett-Packard Co already in the bag, Plasmon says it is in detailed discussion with several major OEM customers, including Siemens.
Optical storage is a big attraction in the medical systems market and Plasmon says it is attracting interest from both tier 1 and tier 2 suppliers.
The technology’s capacity is increasing rapidly and Plasmon says it is working on 60GB, that will double the current capacity, and believes that further increases up to 120GB will be possible in the future.
Plasmon is also increasing its grip on the technology by paying 1.1m pounds ($2m) in cash to the Japanese camera company Pentax for the opto-mechanical assembly technology used in the drives. This has been necessary because to lower costs, it has switched the contract to Konica Minolta.
With compliance legislation forcing higher standards, Plasmon hopes to cash in on the market for secure data archiving, in the face of competition from tape, which dominates the market and increasingly cheap and capacious hard drives.
Though tape has attempted to defend its market itself by using software to prevent manipulation of historical data or accidental erasure, Plasmon says it cannot compete with write-once optical drives.
Plasmon finance director Tim Arthur says that because tape is magnetic, it is still alterable and the data could be simply destroyed by someone with a large magnet.
