Iomega sets challenge to Irwin in removable QIC tape drives

Electronic News, June 22, 1992 by Gerry Khermouch

NEW YORK -- Iomega Corp. this week will take the plunge into the market for removable quarter-inch cartridge (QIC) tape drives with an inch-high, 3.5-inch unit that comes as a direct challenge to industry leader Irwin Magnetic Systems.

While Iomega has been known primarily for its Bernoulli Box lines of removable disk drives, the introduction caps a quiet effort spanning more than two years that has resulted in the industry's first removable QIC drive that can read tapes conforming to Irwin's proprietary EZTape systems and to the QIC-80 standard.

Styled Tape250, the new drive works off a personal computer's existing floppy controller and is claimed to have a capcity of as much as 250MB with extendedlength tape and data compression. It is immediately available in three configurations starting at a suggested retail price of $299.

Only two weeks earlier, Irwin made its own entry into the inch-high segment with a QIC-80 unit of similar capacity styled SuperHornet, which also plugs into a floppy slot. Until Irwin's entry, the only participant in the inch-high, 3.5-inch segment was TEAC, which last year unveiled a 155MB SCSI unit.

With OEM pricing starting at $249, the Irwin unit would seem to be higher-priced than the Iomega product, but it offers several distinct features, including full insertion of the tape cartidge.

Together, the two introductions are likely to lend further longevity to the mini-cartridge tape category, which has shown surprising resilience in the face of pressure from competing media and capacity ranges, observed Robert Abraham, vice president of Freeman Associates Inc., Santa Barbara, Calif. The Iomega drive in particular, with its ability to read both Irwin EZTape and QIC-80 tapes, instantly makes the company a credible participant in the QIC market, he added.

"It's a very, very powerful feature, and a very responsive product to market needs," Mr. Abraham said. "To be able to read an installed base of several millions (of Irwin tapes) is quite a coup."

Marty Burke, product manager for tape and network at the Roy, Utah, company, acknowledged that the development effort at Iomega's Io-Tape unit in San Diego took about a year longer than expected, but said the timing should prove fortuitous. Demand for storage-gobbling Windows is booming, he noted, and there is considerable market uncertainly surrounding Irwin as it is absorbed into Archive Corp., which acquired Irwin's parent, Cipher Data Products, in 1990.

"There's a lot of change occurring and a lot of opportunity," declared Mr. Burke, a former Irwin employee who left after the Archive acquisition. "It turns out that our timing is just about perfect."

As the market pioneer, Irwin was able to establish its EZTape format as a de facto standard among users, but in recent years it has been challenged by numberous competitors who have banded together around the competing QIC format. These firms include the other major vendor in the minicartridge drive market, Colorado Memory Systems of Loveland, Col., as well as several subsidiaries of Archive itself. As reported, Archive restructured Irwin several months ago, breaking it up into OEM and distribution units while laying off much of its Ann Arbor, Mich., staff and consolidating operations at Archieve's Costa Mesa, Calif., headquarters and at the Florida operations of Archive subsidiary Maynard Electronics (EN, Dec. 16, 1991).

As a result, customers have been watching closely to see how Irwin evolves under Archive's control. While the new SuperHornet was introduced under the Irwin OEM banner, it acutally succeeds the Hornet line manufactured for Archive subsidiary Ardat Inc. by Japan's Matsushita-Kotobuki Electronics (MKE), and reads tapes conforming to the QIC-80 format rather than the Irwin format. It is manufactured by MKE in Japan.

Asked whether Irwin planned a similar product to support the Irwin EZTape format, Irwin director of strategic sales and marketing Robert Smith replied that the company over the past year has made an unannounced inch-high EZ-Tape unit available to OEMs. As for the possibility of offering a single drive that, like Iomega's, will support both formats, Mr. Smith said the company has concluded that customer demand does not currently warrant its bringing out such a "dual-personality" drive.

Engineering an Iomega drive that could read Irwin tapes was a formidable task, insofar as the company had to reverse-engineer the closed-loop-servo system in a manner that did not trespass on Irwin's intellectual property, Mr. Burke contended. Those technological hurdles likely have kept other vendors from bringing similar systems to market, said Freeman Associates' Mr. Abraham, adding that it would be no great surprise if Irwin moved to legally challenge the Iomega system.

"The Irwin read/write formats are protected under a number of patents," Irwin's Mr. Smith advised. "It will be interesting to see" the new Iomega product.

Mr. Burke said an intensive effort was made to design the Tape250 so that it could profitably be manufactured in Utah rather than overseas. The unit contains only a single fastener, he said, and the printed circuit board snaps into place without cables or other external attachments, facilitating a highly automated production process. Once the robotics line is fully in place, he indicated, each unit should require only 10 minutes to complete the assembly and test process.