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Este informe no está disponible en español. CARIBBEAN BUSINESS Ninety Percent Of Storagetek’s Data Storage Systems Sold WorldwideCompany Launches 50 New Products And System Enhancements In Three Years By MARIALBA MARTINEZ August 14, 2003 Ninety percent of StorageTek de Puerto Rico’s data storage products are manufactured and marketed worldwide from its facility in Ponce, said General Manager Tom Despres. "Over the past three years, StorageTek has become a significant player in the storage industry, introducing more than 25 new products and 20 enhancements to our innovative line of storage solutions & services," said Despres, who has been manager of the four-year-old local company for a year. "StorageTek Global Services is now an $800 million business, with earnings increasing 86% during the first six months of 2003 while protecting our 6% sales revenue." The four-building, 150,000-square-foot complex in Ponce is one of StorageTek’s three manufacturing sites in the world. It has 500 employees, 160 of them engineers and other professionals. Ponce’s facility manufactures, and is a market leader in, three product areas: automation units (28% market share), high-end tape drive units (56%), and virtual tape units (53%). By next month, StorageTek will have moved out of a fifth building near the Ponce complex and consolidated all its operations. "Our company has [increased its] profitability, driven costs out of the business, and increased earnings while protecting revenue during difficult times for the technology industry," said Despres. "Strategies such as lean manufacturing and Six Sigma helped carry us through difficult economic times. We call it unleashing trapped profitability and profitable revenue growth." Despres credits his executive staff and the plant’s employees as the keys to staying focused on production. They constantly benchmark the plant’s productivity against the delivery plans. "The easiest way to measure us is against what we say we are going to do," he said. Despres added that StorageTek’s plans include increasing the government’s preference rate, which currently stands at 10%. "Some competitors have increased their preference rate and can’t say that 90% of their worldwide distribution is locally produced," he said. "We can. We are very proud of that fact and will use it to negotiate in our favor." StorageTek is unique in that it competes with the top information technology companies in marketing and selling storage products and services at the same time that it supplies and buys products and materials from these competitors, among them IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Systems. StorageTek’s best-selling products include the SVA and D-Series, Bladestore, PowderHorn, and LSeries, in addition to the 9X40 and LTO / DLT drives. StorageTek has made it to Business Week’s Top 100, Forbes’ Platinum List of the Best Big Companies, InfoWeek’s Top 500 Technology Driven Organizations, Fortune’s Most Admired Companies, Bloomberg’s Top 100 Stocks List, and the Wall Street Journal’s Shareholder Scorecard. In 2002, China’s Center of Information Industry presented StorageTek with development awards for its storage solutions in the finance sector and for user satisfaction in storage-area network (SAN) solutions. This Caribbean Business article appears courtesy of Casiano Communications.
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