Certance

» see certance.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Certance was a tape drive company in Costa Mesa, California, and it answered to that name for less than two of the years it existed. The business began in 1996 as the removable storage division of Seagate, which had just absorbed Conner Peripherals, which had earlier absorbed Archive Corporation and the tape assets that came with it. A restructuring in 2000 pushed the division out on its own as Seagate Removable Storage Solutions. It traded under that mouthful until April 2003, when it picked the name Certance and a chief executive, Howard Matthews, who told the trade press that the word was meant to suggest certainty.

What it actually sold was the boring middle of the backup market: DAT and DDS drives for small offices, plus autoloaders that held a handful of tapes and swapped them without a person in the room. The one piece of genuine standing it had was Linear Tape-Open. Certance was one of the three companies that created the LTO format, alongside IBM and Hewlett-Packard, which meant it collected a share of the royalties every time anyone else sold an Ultrium cartridge.

Tape never reached a Turkish house. Backup in my world was a stack of blank CD-Rs from the computer shop in the arcade, then DVD-Rs, plus the understanding that a disc going bad meant losing whatever had been on it. A DDS cartridge was something you met in a server room if you had a reason to be standing in one, and my reasons came years after this company was gone.

~ the record ~

~ what sixty million bought ~

Quantum announced the deal on 20 October 2004 and closed it on 5 January 2005. The price was $60 million in cash, of which about $40 million had actually been paid by the end of that March. Quantum's own annual report lists what arrived with it: the LTO Ultrium line alongside the older DAT and Travan products, the autoloaders, the tape head manufacturing, and a factory in Penang.

The audited accounts filed alongside that acquisition are where the story is. Certance Holdings booked revenue of $225.6 million in the fiscal year ending 2 July 2004, against $223.0 million the year before and $248.4 million the year before that, on net income of $12.2 million. More than a thousand people worked there. The whole profitable thing changed hands for about 27 percent of a single year's revenue, which is not what a growing business costs.

~ why tape lost ~

The reason is in the shape of those three revenue figures. They do not fall off a cliff, they just stop going anywhere, and a storage business that stops growing in a market where capacity doubles on a schedule is a business being quietly priced for its last few years. Hard disks had become cheap enough to back up to, and the formats Certance owned at the small end, DAT and Travan, were the ones a small office would abandon first. Quantum bought the royalty stream and the manufacturing, told its shareholders it had become the world's largest volume supplier of tape drives and tape automation, then relabeled the lot.

The strange afterlife is in the firmware. Quantum drives kept answering to the names of their dead parents for years, which is why support articles had to explain why a tape unit identified itself as Seagate or Certance when the label on the front said something else. A brand can be retired in an afternoon. The string burned into the device is harder to get rid of, and that string outlasted the company by years, answering from inside hardware nobody sold under that name anymore.

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