Commenting on its figures (opposite) Storage Technology Corp says that growth in expenses has outpaced revenue growth this year, leading to disappointing financial performance, adding that most of the growth was in research and development, although it is looking at actions to bring operating expenses more in line with revenues in keeping with our traditional ratios. StorageTek notes over the first half, it has been experiencing a slowing of buying decisions as customers evaluated the announcement of automated tape library products by three competitors and that together with recessionary conditions in most of the major economies of the world, this has led to library shipments that are below our expectations. On its OnlinePlus programmes – Iceberg and Alpine fault-tolerant disk products – the company is extremely cautious, saying only that initiation of beta testing this quarter remains achievable. Substantial progress in systems integration was made during the quarter but certain segments of coding continue to consume greater than anticipated time to debug. Nevertheless, nothing has proven to be insoluble. We expect this will continue until product completion, chairman Ryal Poppa commented.
